• A receipt when a person comes to our site and purchases something.
• Their license key if what they purchased requires a license key.
• Replies if they send email to customer support.
• If they have purchased an automatically renewing subscription we email a receipt after it renews or a notice that it was declined if the charge does not go through. This is required by the major credit card companies.
• If they have an automatically renewing subscription and they are on a plan other than monthly we send a reminder before it tries to renew. This is required by the major credit card companies and by the consumer protection laws in many jurisdictions.
The problem here is that "we are legally required to send it" and "our customers want to receive it" aren't necessarily the same thing. I'd probably be pretty annoyed by those if I had more than a few subscriptions!
That's what email filters are supposed to be for. They aren't "spam".
> Was this email solicited by me?
The author describes unsolicited emails and somehow misses the point that spam is a term for unsolicited emails.
The reminder email in your list sounds unsolicited, so I'd probably report that one as spam as well. I wasn't aware it was mandatory, probably because it's not where I live.
My transactional inboxes are mostly clean as a result. My "spam" inbox, however, is full of crap (the email I use to sign up to freemium services).
Surely that’s a lot less hassle for all involved than having to get your bank to issue chargebacks on subscription renewals you forgot about?
Legal requirements aside — when I have an ongoing business relationship with a company, "we are about to take money from you again" is an expected, useful and welcome message.
that is the idea of the Gmail business. it's not complicated.
Last week, my monitoring system sent me 20k emails in a few hours in response to a server attack.
When those hit my gmail inbox, gmail marked them all as spam. Myself, the user, did not mark them as spam. Gmail did that for me. But their reputation system is behaving as if 20k people marked 20k emails from us as spam.
In response to those 20k emails marked as spam, now our domain sender reputation with gmail is LOW, and our low volume of legitimate email with customers goes to their spam folders.
The gmail client gives me no way to unmark these messages as spam, except to click on each message, one at a time, and dig into a submenu to find the "Not spam" button.
I check my spam folder regularly and it has been this way for as far as I can remember.