I'm running an email server and I can tell you that this is by and large not the case.
If you put some decent effort into making sure that you don't send spam, try to monitor if anyone thinks you send spam and react when someone complains that you send spam (and stop it), it works.
In my experience people telling these stories often do send spam, but they don't believe they do. ("It's not spam, it's a Newsletter. No, it has no unsubscribe link. These are people that agreed to be put on the newsletter by clicking on some ToS they never read, and they can unsubscribe by some arcane mechanism that we will make as complicated as we can. But we're definitely not spammers.")
If you put some decent effort into making sure that you don't send spam, try to monitor if anyone thinks you send spam and react when someone complains that you send spam (and stop it), it works.
In my experience people telling these stories often do send spam, but they don't believe they do. ("It's not spam, it's a Newsletter. No, it has no unsubscribe link. These are people that agreed to be put on the newsletter by clicking on some ToS they never read, and they can unsubscribe by some arcane mechanism that we will make as complicated as we can. But we're definitely not spammers.")