I find 2 faults with e-mails
1. It isn't really quick and useful to ask where someone is on the server. Because once you check your email, they are sure to have been long gone from that sever. And reloading the page every five seconds? Aint nobody got teim fo dat. Its a waste of time and such a big stretch to ask quick and small things.
2. Some people have their full name on their e-mail accounts so ofc they aren't going to share it. If they wanted to send an email to someone else, they would be out of luck and they would have to tell that person in game their message. But you would have to search all the servers to find your friends.
Also I have seen the /mail command in action, it is indeed only friends and about a 10 - 40 minute cooldown would reduce spam :).
1) It is quick and it is useful. - If people use it correctly. - Send me an email, and I'll reply to you in less then a minute, how I can do that? Because I use email clients, and get a notification across multiple devices as soon as one is received, simple.
2) Not the email's fault. Thats the users fault. Making a new email account with something like gmail takes about 1 to 2 minutes, not really that hard, if someone wants a separate email account that they can share. - My email is
info@halothe23.com that easy. :P
For your last sentence, Issue is, if you make it easy to use, its easy to abuse. Not many users will go the real email route to do an appeal/hack report, well, a few do, as I get some daily, but if you make it as easy as /mail <username> <text> - you're literally calling for abuse. If we're ever going to implement something like that, we'll need to make some ways of preventing that, such as allowing only friends to message each other, and possibly integration with real services (mail etc) to give notifications. So its not something that will happen
immediately as we already have
many things coming.