A few years ago I switched the mail provider for the company I work for from a small MSP provider over to Google Workspace. The reason is my boss’ inbox had an average of 5k+ of spam daily. He even had to abandon one of his email addresses at one point. After switching over to Google that number went to a more manageable few dozen daily.
It’s absolutely a massive problem.
If you get 100 spam emails a day, then without those protections that have been put into place that number would be in the 100s of thousands at best.
That’s not entirely true. The push for KYC came because spam started going crazy. You have no clue how bad spam is right now. And believe me, you don’t know. Take the worst case scenario you can think of, and multiply that by 100, and that starts to describe the state of spam emails for the past decade.
Maybe they were just worried that kids were getting into hacking!
https://youtu.be/t1oHuDos8TI