What I love about emails is that no ads are pushed into it, one of the few places where you can read information without Javascript and decide when and if to load external content.
I think innovations should be welcome, but they should have their own name and avoid considering a legacy system wrong by default.
Reinvent the wheel is hard,however I hope to see something great in the future (gpg for everyone for example).
I pretty much always opt for email notifications as opposed to some proprietary system - this allows me to decide what to do with them (including turning them back into a push notification by using something like Pushover, while the official app's push is disabled because they mix in marketing spam with useful notifications) even when the sender would rather not have me do that.
Believe it or not, I receive more spam than non-spam email each month.
Wouldn't that be classified as spammy ads from a valid message (when done using dark patterns with no one-click unsubscribe option)?
The only exception I found was the democratic party mailing list. No idea how I even ended up on that as I don't live in the US, but NEVER give them your real/main email address. The spam is relentless and impossible to block because they are continually setting up new domain names.
When a new ad campaign occurs, they create a new "list" and mail everyone again.
This is spam.
Recently, I gave my email address when having my car serviced. The next day, I received an email from Sirius XM, because the shop has a partnership trial deal with Sirius. I marked that email as spam, because it was entirely unrelated to any legitimate use for which I had provided the email address. That it was being sent by a legitimate company doesn't change the fact that it was spam.