It's become hard after so many avenues of abuse. When I started in the web on the late 90s/early 2000s it was surprisingly easy to send emails programatically.

It's become hard after so many avenues of abuse. When I started in the web on the late 90s/early 2000s it was surprisingly easy to send emails programatically. Get yourself a SMTP server and fire away, even rolling out your own was totally fine to have your emails reaching users (though configuring postfix/smtpd was a fucking pain in the ass). Then spammers progressively got frenzier, GMail appeared in 2004 with a good spam filter, spammers tried to beat the spam filters and the arms race brought us to this point where sending emails and having them reach an inbox is a massive headache...