Not necessarily broken, but certainly outdated. What do you think about spam, encryption, attachment sizes?
Imagine being able to publish your email address online without worrying about spam; even in your profile you've been forced to obfuscate your own a little. Or to know that every message you send can only be read by the recipient and nobody in-between - without having to explain PGP to non-techs. Or being able to send a 50-100MB file without resorting to third party or public hosting - any of those features would be a bonus, in my view.
You make a good point. Why would I obfuscate like that? My email is out there in git logs, mailing list logs, lists stolen from other websites, lists bought from other websites.
I can't see that encryption will ever work end-to-end as we want. People are too stupid to learn most things. Technical solutions rely on big corporations that we trust to do the Right Thing(TM). The Right Thing(TM) is impossible from US companies and probably impossible from European companies.
Attachments. I don't remember the last time I sent a large one. As far as I know most of the size limitations are artificially implemented by companies that don't want to spend that much on storage. Other limitations such as Gmail's block on executables is because people are stupid and will run everything they get sent.
People will never not be stupid so we can never have nice things.
