To be fair, the problem for real people is that email isn't secure. We're conditioned to receiving letters and believing them. They have the company's letterhead etc. Obviously, that wasn't secure either, but it took effort to mess with, so it's a safe bet that if a letter landed on your door mat claiming to be from Company X, it came from Company X. Online that breaks because it's trivial for anyone smarter than a nematode to generate authentic-looking email from whomever (though I'll admit it helps to have fingers). Solutions like PGP signing fail because they're too complicated. Once you are forced to use acronyms like SSL and HTTPS and PGP, you might as well impale yourself on the giant stick of FAIL and make sucky-sucky dying noises as your remaining clue dribbles out and soaks into the ground. Can anyone normal deal SSL certificates? Sure, click the padlock, navigate a labyrinth of nested dialogues, and then what am I supposed to do? It doesn't help that about the certificates on the net seem to be wrong (my own beloved ISP does the same, I was Pipex, it's now TalkTalk - whose the certificate still for? Tiscali, after their brief dalliance). Should I stop sending email?
Email is HTTP these days and people will put their responses at the top. Other than sullenly insisting on repositioning my cursor at the bottom of messages (thus ensuring that most of planet think I suffer from premature email despatch, and are thus receiving blank messages), I'm rolling with it. Stupid shit like munging domain names and setting their clocks, welcome the world of marketing emails. The people who press the SEND button just assume it's set-up. If you dealt with our IT people, you'd know why that's a dangerous assumption.
I'm not sure what the solution is, other than like all solutions, it should be at least 50% commonsense, and whatever portion is technological should be friction free.
Santander are shit though. They have our mortgage (since that swallowed up Alliance & Leicester) and never manage anything right. I think it took about eight letters and 72 hours on the phone to get them to reverse the inclusion of our last rearrangement fee from the loan. We clearly stated several times that we wanted to simply pay the fee. Even ticked a box to that effect.