Phishing emails that take users to fake sites where they are asked to login resulting in stolen passwords. This insecurity makes users less likely to try new sites for fear of malicious JavaScript etc.
Email assumes that I want to see everything addressed to me. I don't so I have a spam/junk folder. But a lot of resources are wasted sending content that people don't care about.
Email should become a pull system, where you get a notification that a message is waiting for you on server X. Server X is trusted? Then I'll take a look, oh, it's fakegoogle@serverx, I'll block them specifically. I never see that content again, period. No one else can put a message into fakegoogle@serverx's outbox so I can be confident that I'm not accidentally blocking valid content (no address spoofing). If I trust someone, like rawgabbit@rawgabbit.com, then I can automatically retrieve the content until you prove untrustworthy (either by your deliberate actions, or by having weak security that grants others access to your system).
This also handles not just spam, but promotional content. If someone wants to send out promotional content to 1 million customers, I can optionally retrieve it or just "unsubscribe" by never retrieving it. It's on them to continue hosting content that's never retrieved so at some point they'll detect that Jtsummers has stopped getting their content and just stop sending it to me.
Pull might also be a nice way to address the 'right now!' problem. Some, likely most information can wait till you're ready and doesn't need be available till then.
Email should become a pull system, where you get a notification that a message is waiting for you on server X. Server X is trusted? Then I'll take a look, oh, it's fakegoogle@serverx, I'll block them specifically. I never see that content again, period. No one else can put a message into fakegoogle@serverx's outbox so I can be confident that I'm not accidentally blocking valid content (no address spoofing). If I trust someone, like rawgabbit@rawgabbit.com, then I can automatically retrieve the content until you prove untrustworthy (either by your deliberate actions, or by having weak security that grants others access to your system).
This also handles not just spam, but promotional content. If someone wants to send out promotional content to 1 million customers, I can optionally retrieve it or just "unsubscribe" by never retrieving it. It's on them to continue hosting content that's never retrieved so at some point they'll detect that Jtsummers has stopped getting their content and just stop sending it to me.