A larger point, maybe, is that advertising is often obnoxious, whether commercials on television or road signs on the highway. There are pleasant exceptions (e.g., the Burma Shave signs that used to decorate fence posts) but not many. The nature of advertising is to intrude -- to grab the attention of potential customers and sell them something. If you're fundamentally a non-shopper, you learn to tune out ads wherever you find them. I can, for instance, watch an entire TV show and end up unable to say who sponsored it. I only intermittently read newspaper ads, for all that ads, rather than subscriptions, put the meat on a newspaperman's table.
An e-mail account, unlike a newspaper, is semi-private, hence a candidate for some degree of protection against unwanted intrusion. But how much protection? Some? A lot? That which befits the ayatollahs' Iran? We might want to relax a bit
The commercial instinct -- which lies behind advertising of every kind -- possibly ought to be, but isn't ever going to be, completely lovely. People are going to try to sell us things we regard, often rightly, as ridiculous, moronic, tasteless, wasteful or unnecessary. Our job as consumers in a free society is to sort out, using our common sense, the moronic and wasteful from the desirable and useful.
Advertising is a tool -- one among many -- to advance that task. Even Jarnett Yoder (see above) has a place in this complex scheme of things. How nice it would be if this, ah, gentleman found larger uses for his time than the debasement of commercial discourse! But, sigh, freedom depends in some degree on the right to stupidity aforethought.
Let us as a society curb spam if we can ve-e-e-ry gently, with care and caution.