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...Why default to restricting to a whitelist? If the government is giving you an email address, you should be able to use that as your only email address, that you use for talking with friends and family, etc.

If someone's abusing the privilege, then there can be restrictions added.

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Inbox restrictions: because otherwise every single service ever will start accepting only official government emails to sign up, killing anonymity on the internet (and clogging your official mailbox with not-quite-spam).

Outbox restrictions: because otherwise every citizen who gets a bit of malware on one of their devices will start sending spam and get (temporarily) restricted, and the whole point is to have a reliable address that you know the citizen cannot lose access to. Also because it would be real weird if you could send messages to addresses that cannot reply to you because of the inbox whitelist.

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