Amazing: using broken software for years ?

I'm sure that nobody reading this forum would use these facilities 
which I use here in degenerating S.Africa to reduce my telco costs.

Webmail: the ability to fetch [preferably in text form - lynx-like],
html, via email.    A Bob Rankin, now deceased, used to promote and
post the status of the various servers who offered this service [free]
mostly for the 3rd world.

Since these are run by bigish organisations : NGOs or universities 
we see the remarkable inertia.   Ie. they just leave the broken
software running for ever. I've found [annoying] work arounds, but
I suspect the many would-be users haven't. Eg;

1. getweb@[EMAIL PROTECTED]
  returns URLs with 2 "." when the "." wraps to a new line

2. webgate@[EMAIL PROTECTED]
  often decodes  the web-page to base64 and sends the whole lot,
 instead of sending just the text [lynx-like] and if the size is too big
  it notifies "too big" without showing the URL so that the user can
  make other arrangements. This is like bouncing email, without
  notifying which email bounced !
  And if it's a lo-tech solution, for the 3rd world users why send
  all the eye-candy crap plus the extra load of base64 encoding ?

3. agora@[EMAIL PROTECTED]
 for some unknown reason decodes every N'th ascii char thus:
"'s" -> "$BCT(B"
"'t" -> "$BCU(B"
"n" -> "$BEO(B"
"p" -> "$BEQ(B"
.... etc ??!

Wow, I think I've just spotted the 'translation algorithm'.
It's not just random.

Is it normal in the 'industry' for such broken software to be just left
running ?

== Chris Glur.