There was a good article in the New York Times about the decline in web based email, but this chart from the blog Contrarian sums it up well:
It’s quite astounding to me. I can recall the affects and the switch to email in the mid 90s when more people started getting email at work and from services provided by ISPs. Then web based email came along from sites like Yahoo! Gmail itself only came out in 2004. During that time mail carriers suffered in adjusting to the loss of personal mail. I would have thought that email would have lasted at least another decade. But looking at this chart, I’d be surprised if it too was around in 5 years.
Smart People I Know 
I don’t think this graph necessarily shows that email is dying. I think it shows on the far end that older people are finally starting to adopt the technology because they simply can’t ignore it anymore (I have noticed this in my family with many of the 60+ crowd finally getting online). I think in the middle of the graph some of what we used to use email for is now being better served by other services (but that doesn’t mean that these trends will continue indefinitely to the ultimate demise of email). On the near side, in my experience, this shows that young people have the time to be available nearly always on mediums where real-time or near-real-time communication is possible. When I was young I was almost always reachable by IM (and hence I didn’t have a need of email). I didn’t have a lot of other responsibilities making me unavailable like I do now. I send far more emails now than I did when I was under 20.
Good read on that, Tom. I think there are qualities about email that will serve older people, regardless of what the technology will be latter. Depending on your role and responsibilities, you won’t always want to be reachable by technology, be it an old fashioned phone or old fashioned email. 🙂
Very interesting post – not sure if this trend will change now that we have mobile devices which has very easy access to emails.
My nephews and nieces (10 of them, ranging from 14 to 28) are organizing a cousins get-together on Boxing Day using email. It was bugging me that they were using “reply all” so I suggested to create a Facebook event instead. Well, I got told to go away and they felt emails were better (most of them have Blackberries) for communication.
LOL! Well, I thought your idea was a good one, but I also know that younger ones often look upon any suggestions from older people with suspicion.
But reply all?! Kids today! 🙂