Bold 9000 to Bold 9900? Group Texting on AT&T

So long story short, I picked up a Blackberry Bold 9000 a week ago and decided to start using it as primary phone for fun. Now I've grown to love it, but I've got two problems:

1. Email doesn't work because I can't register in the Host Routing Table menu, which seems to be a critical step in the process of setting up email for some reason.
2. Group mms text messages work in a manner totally different from a modern phone and are unusable for all intents and purposes.

I want to keep the feel of that phone and fix the above problems. Does the Bold 9900 fix group text messaging? To be clear, by group text messaging I mean participating in the same thread of messages with multiple other cell numbers. I do not mean sending the same message individually to multiple numbers.