> The free market competition means that spammers will come along and pay their protection money as well and there goes the service.

And the free market competition will ensure that those providers make stopping spammers (at the source -- signing up for an email service) their priority.

Spammers still use SES! Just the other day I found an SES IP blocked by Spamhaus. I'd argue smaller providers can be even better than AWS at preventing spammers from signing up -- they just need to play like smaller providers and actually vet/accept through referral/etc.

Smaller providers also must be much more careful about accepting spammers, so this helps keep them sharp -- and hopefully we get to a bigger smorgasbord of choices.

[0]: https://vadosware.io/post/even-amazon-ses-has-ips-blocked-by...

I heard there are some scale limits (somewhat ironically) for outgoing but I will put this on the list too, it's a great solution as well.

I usually think of just using SES whole sale but these days they have receiving too... Might be a good way to hide from the other big clouds that are a bit more entrenched in the email space.