No offence intended at all, but I am pretty sure some those are issues on your side as we have no problems at all with this:
- Dates problem -> cannot reproduce it anymore
- Email notifications -> some things improved but it seems like another issue was introduced in the last release, however, if you send them through PHP and your server has the email module correctly set up, they are sent as we do receive them without any issue at all.. have you checked all of your logs??
- Direct link -> never had an issue with this, probably an issue on your side
