I can't stand when project names contain false altruism. Especially one built to send spam emails.
Ever heard the one about the non-profit activist orgs that had to send emails to tens of thousands of people who had already opted into receiving emails and had to allocate substantial portions of their budget to sending out their donation drive emails because the system keeps breaking and different companies and government departments keep finding new ways to make things worse, requiring regular mail-outs, and there wasn't really any near-zero-conf, _actually_ cheap off-the-shelf solution for that?
It's hilarious, the punch line involves being called false altruists and spammers.
Out of those people that did intentionally opt-in, would they still opt-in if they knew the frequency of the e-mails?
I remember being on the receiving end of exactly the same scenario you describe - non-profit entity sending spam. I actually intentionally subscribed when signing a petition and assumed they'd e-mail once a month or so which I would've be fine with.
I was so wrong - they were sending some crap every few days, and even worse they attempted to make them look personal (sent from a real-looking name) even though it's the same garbage they email to hundreds of thousands of other suckers that assumed good faith on their part. In a handful of weeks my inbox was dominated by their spam.
Another case was for a tech-related non-profit that I donated to and explicitly unchecked any opportunity for them to spam me. Well guess what, one year later they still did. They apologized afterwards and said it was a mistake (fair enough), and yet some time later I got yet another spam campaign from them I had to unsubscribe from.
Did you click the unsubscribe button?
Nice to have the option available, but making this too easy can be an organizational footgun if someone doesn't know what they're doing.
Spam has effectively ruined DIY mass-emailing, whether you like it or not. There are multiple other providers if you don't like mailgun.
There are a lot of ways for organizations and non-profits to save money, and I wouldn't recommend doing so with email if it's important to them.
Spam means unsolicited email. There is nothing about this that means you have to send unsolicited email. An people who genuinely spam wont use a tool like this, as they would prefer a network of compromised machines and email accounts to using Amazon SES.
There is a middle ground, a grey area, as others have mentioned with dark patterns to trick you into opting in for things. I am not a fan of these, but this tool isn't really for encouraging that practice.