Until reading this article I assumed every 163.com email I saw was just using one of those temporary email inboxes, for fear of spam emails or due to privacy concerns. I, too, dismissed those emails and considered them as useless as seeing blah@blah.com. Now I know they're actual accounts, just based in China.

well I can remember cix using numeric id's and Prestel (an early viewdata system) used to use nine! digit numbers for your mailbox id eg 018222211

Hope she doesn't want to text anyone.

These days if you have them in your address book you can just start typing their name and then pick from a list.

True, but most so do most email clients, and this still would be breaking her rule of "refus[ing] to communicate with anyone whose email address consisted of a string of numbers".