Yes, absolutely — I’m not suggesting email is anywhere near perfect or free of abuse. But at least collectively, the layers of filtering, reputation systems, and standards make it usable for most people most of the time.

The key difference for me is that the PSTN moves at a snail’s pace, maybe because of regulatory entanglements, maybe because of interoperability constraints. The result is that problems which have been rampant for decades — spoofing, spam, robocalls — remain trivial to exploit. Email has plenty of its own problems here, but at least you get more signals to work with (headers, DKIM/SPF/DMARC, filtering, etc.) than just a string of 10–12 digits with no real context.

That’s why I’m less inclined to “cherish” a system whose shortcomings shift so much burden onto the end user’s well-being, all in the name of interoperability. If interoperability means putting up with abuse at this scale, then that interoperability isn’t worth much — and that’s where my frustration comes from.