I don't want to replicate email. I want to fix it.

Sending email should not be free. It should be really, really cheap to send an email to one person (like a fraction of a fraction of a cent), but get exponentially more expensive the more you send.

People shouldn't be able to send emails to you without your prior approval (which you can revoke at an instant).

The recipient should be able to charge a tack-on fee for having email sent to him. I should be able to charge annoying people a lot to send to me, and charge my friends almost nothing. People who send annoying stuff to me should pay more to get my attention.

All of a sudden, forwarding that stupid article without thinking about the content (or even reading the article they're sending) will be second guessed. Save the money (and time), by sending only worthwhile stuff that you penned.