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Is spamming illegal?

The legislation concerning whether or not spamming is in fact illegal is unclear. There is also the problem with different laws in different countries.

It is this uncertainty that the spammers are exploiting. The status today is that most of the spamming goes without any form of legal action happing against the spammers. From the spammer's standpoint there is very little risk involved with spamming.

From the average persons grasp of what is right and wrong spam seems as something illegal.

There have been some cases where the spammer have forged the header information so that the spam appears to come from someone else. Yahoo.com and Flowers.com have had such cases and won.

Some spammers include in the message something like this:
This message complies with the proposed United States Federal requirements for commercial e-mail bill, Section 301. Per Section 301, Paragraph (a)(2)(C) of S.1618, further transmissions to you by the sender of this e-mail may be stopped at no cost to you by sending a reply to this e-mail address with the word "remove" in the subject line. For additional info, see: https://www.senate.gov/~murkowski/commercialemail /EMailAmendText.html.
This may have you convinced that the spammer is acting within federal law in sending you their message. This bill, commonly referred to as the "Murkowski bill" would have legalized sending spam if certain requirements where met. This bill passed the senate, but it did not make it through conference committee and never passed the House. So this never became a law.

CAN-SPAM Act of 2003:
CAN-SPAM Act was approved by the Senate in November 2003 and by the House of Representatives in December 2003, and was signed into law by President Bush on December 16, 2003. The Controlling the Assault of Non-Solicited Pornography and Marketing Act requires unsolicited commercial e-mail messages to be labeled (though not by a standard method) and to include opt-out instructions and the sender's physical address. It prohibits the use of deceptive subject lines and false headers in such messages. The FTC is authorized (but not required) to establish a "do-not-email" registry. State laws that require labels on unsolicited commercial e-mail or prohibit such messages entirely are pre-empted, although provisions merely addressing falsity and deception would remain in place. The CAN-SPAM Act took effect on January 1, 2004. Apparently according to this law you can send spam emails, as long as you mark them as spam in some undefined way.

Other resources on spam law: https://www.spamlaws.com/