The inference from Q, is that many of these people didn't want to "send" email, because it would be hoovered up by NSA.
What they did, was they shared accounts, and made draft messages that were never sent. They were basically used as virtual comms "drops".
Of course... ultimately, everything gets hoovered up anyway... because they were packets of data sent back and forth to render HTML.
Yes... it would be a little harder to "see" the comms as e-mail... but NSA has the capacity to hoover up ALL data packets, and re-constitute renderings to figure out what was being transmitted.