Sounds like the version you are using is still the “hacked” version that was never part of the sourceforge project. Therefore, nothing is supported in your version, and nothing will ever be fixed in your version. The unstable version at triplea.sourceforge.net are at least supported by the tripleA development team, so there may still be bugs with them, but at least any bugs will be fixed in future releases.
I’d recommend running (not walking) to triplea.sourceforge.net and downloading the lastest unstable release 0.9.4.1 (since no stable releases yet have support for PBEM).
Convince your opponent to use the same version - it shouldn’t be hard if they were using the same version you had (that you say doesn’t work any more).