I completely disagree 100%. I think the mail system is exceptionally well-functioning. It's a massively-scalable, decentralized, asynchronous messaging system that supports large file attachments. At this, it excels. There's not one big evil company controlling all messages and unless you're sending massive amounts of emails every day, your messages almost always end up exactly where they're supposed to. I'd challenge anybody to do better.

The author's main gripe is Mailer Daemon messages. It's not email's fault that people write shitty clients that don't display a pretty failure message. If your car doesn't have anti-lock breaks, it's not the road's fault when you hit a patch of ice and slam into a tree.

Email is great not only because it works simply and beautifully, but because it's so extendable. People think it's broken. It's not. It's just simple...and it's this same simplicity that makes it easy to build on top of. Look at Gmail or Xobni. Both have incredible features that "email" doesn't have because they took the time to build extras on top that make it work nicely.

Email is NOT broken. There's nothing to fix. Whatever fixes you think it needs you can make yourself. The underlying platform works great. If you have a problem, write/patch a client.