I disagree. You need to seriously re-evaluate things anytime you find yourself saying something along the lines of "X is just fine, we just need to educate and/or train people to use it more effectively." That's a subtle hint that the system you're talking about will never get any better than it is right now. There are two reasons for that:

1) There are people you can't instruct. Aristotle made that observation 2000 years ago and it's still true today.

2) There are bad actors out there who profit from abusing the system.

I'd really like to see the flow control of email completely reversed, where the only people who can send me email are the addresses I have whitelisted. For example, instead of subscribing to an email list, I add the email list's email address to my whitelist. A notification of some sort is then automatically sent to the email list requesting access. The email list can then accept or decline. It would work exactly the same way between two people, getting receipts, etc. Either side could revoke access at any time. Then you could automatically have email from certain accounts go into certain folders, tags, etc.

There were indeed proposals to use RSS pull style polling to replace push style email. But the main drag on productivity of email in a business setting is not external spam, but internal occupational spam from colleagues misusing email and overly verbose automated emails, whether out of cluelessness, incompetence, CYA or whatever other reason. A company would be perfectly justified in settings standards for appropriate use of email.

> A company would be perfectly justified in settings standards for appropriate use of email.

Most companies do. And yet, the problem persists. See the points in my previous comment to understand why.