In my opinion, the lesson learnt from the story is that the mail is just an additional feature. We would like to make sure the SMS reply is send no matter what. There is a set of users which didn't work for them or worked wrongly (e.g. multiple mails) from day one and Frank is working on replacing that code.

On the next update (answering also to other people's questions) will come mostly fixes and usability changes. There isn't any significant new features but an effort to establish better what we have.

On your problem, are you allowed to have a gmail.com account from your region? This is know address to work with the settings in the wiki.