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Depends on how you define spam. Services like Mailchimp will send mail that you and I may consider spam, but it gets delivered, because they have teams of people making sure they are following all the rules to the letter and they probably negotiated agreements with Google, Yahoo, Hotmail, etc to whitelist their servers.

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Thanks for the reply. What rules?

It's basically like you described - an informally specified set of rules the various "big players" in e-mail enforce. There's some consensus about the things you "have" to do to participate in e-mail but it's generally not a black and white "do these things and you'll be fine" situation.

As an example, mailing lists are likely to have a header like "list-unsubscribe: <mailto:list@host.com?subject=unsubscribe>", which enables email clients like offer easy unsubscribe buttons.

As a note, this can also be a URL, and can also be used to verify humanness in actual spam and not actually unsubscribe, so in practice pretty much only "good known senders with partnerships" get it to appear.

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