In fact, I’d go so far as to say the opposite, that users sometimes view e-mail as pull. To see why, go ask a common user why some piece of information showed up in their aggregator or inbox. For RSS, the answer is universally “Because I asked for it.”, and that pretty much defines “pull” to the user, regardless of the machine-level interaction. For e-mail, some things like mailing lists will elicit a similar answer “Because I signed up for it.”.

However, most e-mail would garner the response “Because someone sent it to me.”. To users, this defines “push”. There is nothing in the delivery mechanism that makes any difference to how they view their reception of the content in question.