Hi all,
I am the product manager at Workfront responsible for Notifications and Emails. I understand the pain you are experiencing, and we are working curently to solve a part of the problem. With October release, you will be able to configure some notifications related to Projects you Own to be sent daily instad of immediately, and we will be working to enable this functionality for majority of the events. I will be happy to get your feedback once it is available on Preview Oct 19, and definetly after it goes to production later the same month.
As Eric mentioned many users ignore emails, even Admins turn off notifications, because user's don't find them valuable, and it is considered as SPAM sometimes. Once the feature is released, my recommendation is going to be to set majority of the emails to be sent Daily. Like Greg mentioned, probably your users already know that they are going to work on some project, and you have reports setup or they are using Work requests area, but still getting summary email with all of the assignments will ensure they stay informed. Check out the attachment with an example of how it will look like :)
Related to Pause functionality, that's one of the top requested features, we don't have any timeline for it right now, but I will make sure to share with you the news once we start working on it.
Thanks again for all of your feedback!
Anna G