This makes me a little speechless. If a system has these attributes that was carefully crafted, complex, proprietary, then I would agree it's a bad thing. But email is basically putting text in a certain format and transporting it from A to B. It's simple and open, of course people use it to do bad things as well.
Side note: Do you really still have problems with easy to spoof messages? Or with spam? Especially the last one is a non-issue nowadays, I think. In the past we had like hundreds of spam mails unfiltered in our inboxes. Now I have a really good spam filter and checking my spam box from time to time I don't even see that many messages popping up.
Nowadays you are de facto bound to mega providers to get reasonable mail service. It's just not an open platform anymore if you periodically can't send mail to 50% user base silos (yahoo, gmail, live) because of unpredictable spam filtering and no support from them to fix it.
And you need like 1GiB of RAM just to run the spam filtering monster software patchwork of perl spaghetti. Not even mentioning the maintanance work of updating this stuff.
Mail is forever broken and converges to a marked with high entry barriers in which only google and microsoft play.
I think my point was not just from the perspective of a user of email. There are entire research thrusts just in identifying spam, nowadays using machine learning, even. Much bandwidth is wasted, and if you set up your own boxes, you'll have to deal with it yourself, minimally with something like SpamAssasin.
Side note: Do you really still have problems with easy to spoof messages? Or with spam? Especially the last one is a non-issue nowadays, I think. In the past we had like hundreds of spam mails unfiltered in our inboxes. Now I have a really good spam filter and checking my spam box from time to time I don't even see that many messages popping up.