>So what about the technical problems? The crappy security, the poor error messages, that the senders email gets dumped straight to spam without any notification? What about crappy email threading that requires people to send the entire post back in the reply? That if a normal person wants to send emails themselves it's a colossal undertaking that's better farmed out?
All these are issues with email clients and not email itself.
You want security? Encrypt your emails before sending them.
Poor error messages? The computer understands the error code its getting. It's your client that's not showing you a layman understandable error message.
Sender's email dumped straight to spam without notification? Duh, hello, it was sent to Spam because your client classified it as spam (and more often than not, that classification was right). Do you want to get a notification for every email that lands up in your spam folder?
Email, threading works pretty fine in gmail, so I suppose that again is a client problem.
And normal people send and recieve emails daily. Very rarely does a 'normal person' send bulk emails, and if you wish to frequently send bulk emails and not get caught up in spam filters, then you will have to work a bit towards it. However, again this is not a problem with email. It's a problem with the spam filters of service providers.
What I am trying to say here is that the author's point is simply that email is very good at what it does. The issues with email are all in the way the email is handled, and not in email as a technology itself.