> If they have purchased an automatically renewing subscription we email a receipt after it renews (..) This is required by the major credit card companies.

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!

if you are a big Google adwords customer you ask them to let you spam users

that is the idea of the Gmail business. it's not complicated.

I have a really simple algorithm to reporting something as 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).