I think the basic units are fine as they are.
I said nothing about wall levels. I believe you are misunderstanding my post.
I'll support the idea to have a spy gather the academy research done - and in progress, as well as the god worshipped, and how much divine favor is at hand, I believe for completeness you should add Senate building queues, harbor building queues, and what troops are currently being trained. That is an excellent idea.
We, after all, have to spend both silver, and wait while our spy travels. Sending spam, to me, doesn't qualify as spending any kind of resources - except that which we all share - server resources. Isn't this whole idea of finding online status with spam one of the underpinnings of why the limits to mass mail was instituted?
And as a personal response
Games, and literature for that matter, must be realistic to be enjoyable. Even if the reasoning is predicated on fantastic elements. The time stamp for sending mail, as well as opening it, is not within the scope of the game - as there are no game mechanics for it. As such, it needs to rely on real world reasoning - until such time as messengers or other means to deliver those messages are instituted in game. You would not want to read complete gibberish, nor would this game be enjoyable if every time you entered a command, a completely random event happened to a completely random player. The game must be realistic predicated on the elements present.
