> People who are repulsively anti-spam have ruined email as a medium.
That is a ridiculous attitude. Spam has ruined email; anti-spam is the attempt to keep it usable. Anti-spam wouldn't be needed in the first place if not for spammers.
> Amazon SES sends complaint notifications and you're not allowed more than 1 complaint per 1000 emails or they shut you down too.
Good, that sounds like a reasonable step.
Now if only there were existential-level fines for sending spam, too.
Yes, I am aware of people who use the "report spam" button because they can't be bothered to hit "unsubscribe". Which wouldn't be as much of a problem if 1) they felt like they'd subscribed in the first place, rather than being tricked by a default-to-spamming "do you not not not want us to not spam you" checkbox, 2) spammers didn't act like having an "unsubscribe" link was all they need to do to make it okay to send unsolicited commercial email, and 3) unsubscribing reliably worked.
> transactional emails
Transactional emails have never been the problem. People buying lists of emails and sending email marketing spam and trying to defend that as in any way a legitimate practice have always been the problem, along with phishing, scams, etc.