Hi Roger,
You've been a great supporter of SawmillCreek through the years--thank you! I checked into the logic for you and here is what I found.
SawmillCreek will automatically generate an email reminder 3 days prior to a subscription expiring, once a year for an annual subscription, or once a month for a one month subscription. (There is also a 30-day reminder on annual subscriptions which Keith is referring to.) When a subscription is set up, you have the option of setting the subscription to "recurring" through your payment processor (PayPal). SawmillCreek sets up the recurring payment on your behalf but does not handle any of the monthly transactions, it only waits for the payment processor to send a receipt that your subscription has been processed. The recurring payments are handled entirely by your payment processor, so SawmillCreek has no way of knowing the outcome until the payment is made; i.e. recurring subscriptions look just like one-time subscriptions.
The best solution for monthly subscribers wishing to have one less email to worry about is to have your payment processor pay 3 days early, so you'll never see a reminder email until you are actually expired. However, I don't think PayPal lets you adjust this in the "Automated Payments" settings, where you would go to manage your recurring payments. Another solution is to switch to the annual subscription. Theoretically, Keith could add 4 days to your current subscription expiration date assuming you're paid up, so that PayPal would send your recurring payment each month just before you would ordinarily receive the 3 day reminder. This would continue to work unless you switched your subscription settings from monthly to annual.