- E-mail can be spoofed (authenticity not guaranteed) and lacks other elements of security such as a widely-supported encryption method. - The only thing you n

- E-mail can be spoofed (authenticity not guaranteed) and lacks other elements of security such as a widely-supported encryption method. - The only thing you need in order to spam somebody is their address, and there is no real defense aside from performing server-melting numbers of computations to analyze E-mails. The lack of authenticity (above) is also a factor. - E-mail was never really designed for many of the things it is now used for, requiring a lot of tricks for it to work at all. This also contributes to inefficiencies in processing E-mail data that a different protocol/format would avoid. - These deficiencies have led in part to a lot of centralization that is not desirable. For instance, it would be preferable if people could easily run their own E-mail servers but due to the chances of spam, etc. a lot of E-mail will not be routed correctly if you do.