The biggest problem is email viruses. We could almost completely get rid of them if we a)used pgp sigs religiously b) disallowed ALL attachments. People have started using their email accounts like they are file transfer clients. Or, if that is not possible, have all files sent or recieved encrypted and signed and unless they are, automatically do not accept them.
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Ok I agree with the first half of your comment but this just strikes me as completely the wrong aproach to the problem. First of all option b) disallow ALL attachments... are you on crack?! Throwing away the model doesnt count as fixing it.. and option a) use pgp... well yes it would be great for people to start using pgp but if the email software is still vulnerable then you still have a problem.. if everyone signed their emails it wouldnt make a blind bit of diffrence as worms would simply send out emails to all your contacts and sign the email for good measure... if your machine is compromised at root/admin level then you're basically fucked... we need to start developing ways of preventing the security compromise in the first place... this sort of thing is already being looked at (checkout OpenBSD and their bag of goodies)... an email program has no business poking around /etc/passwd... a word processor should not need access to low level networking... if we restrict the access rights of individual programs and audit the code thoroughly then we're three quarters of the way there...

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