I'm not sure I buy the idea of email as a private alternative to Facebook. To keep your message content private, wouldn't all parties need to be hosting their own servers or using encryption?

There's also the problem of knowing who you're contacting and when. Hiding that would probably take some kind of anonymous remailer program.

Normal people would probably just have a free email account from companies like gmail or yahoo and not use any encryption. Wouldn't services like TinyLetter then be transferring the data from Facebook to other email hosting companies? This takes care of some privacy issues but still doesn't seem to solve all of problems for private communication.