Not picking on Ms. M. - I just see so much of this mis-naming/identifying of these threats that I finally got fed up....
I wouldn't view it as picking on.. It's always good to get clarification.

The payload in the case of the "classic" virus is the generation of new email to all the email addresses it can harvest from the new victim which contain a new copy of itself.
I'm curious as to what is "classic" since virus have been around for a while and using email as an attack vector/propogation is a relatively new thing ("I Love You" was the first, no? This would place it around 2000 and yet, virus have been around since the 70s (one site I found suggests that Elk Cloner was the first wild virus -- circa 1981).

Perhaps the "neo-classical" virus use email as it's form of propogation?