I would feel bad about telling people to email me at shortmail.com, but a VC who receives tons of unsolicited pitches wouldn't. Some would love charging a fee to get pitched over email. If it takes 30 seconds and they pay you 20 bucks, why not.
1. No native Android application. They try to sell themselves as a replacement for both SMS and email combined, which would be great, but if I'm limited to IMAP, there's no way it can replace email.
2. Yet another email address. Sometimes someone does need to send me a long email, and I do need to read it. The process needs to be possible but mildly painful (to discourage them from doing it). Quarantining/bouncing the email (their current solutions) aren't quite right. But they're on the right track.
However, I'm holding out hopes for one reason: they're implementing this as an open protocol - ie, within the extant email headers, so the functionality isn't limited to Shortmail-hosted email.
So I check the "Why shortmail" page (which 99% of visitors will not do), and I'm still not sure what happens if incoming e-mails are longer than 500 chars.