It used to be that email was the main way of staying in touch with people. Except for a few clueless technophobe friends, many of the people with whom I want to stay in contact are on Facebook. It's a much more participatory way of staying in touch. The folks on my friends list are forever in my peripheral vision and a part of my everyday existence. Email as a method of communication seems like a jarring and unwanted intrusion. Thankfully, at least as far as I'm concerned, email as means of personal contact is rapidly going the way of the dinosaur. (You're headed for extinction: E&S, DR and others!)I still open my email but the content is now quite different. I usually read through op-in mail from companies. It's not really spam as I like getting the information. These include marketing messages from businesses such as ticketmaster.ca, videomatica.ca, ncix.com, petcetera.ca, as well as various cruise ship and other travel companies. I also get status announcements for some online sites and although they could be eliminated, I prefer to keep them. For example if someone comments on any Flickr photo, I get a message. Even this type of correspondence may in the not too distant future disappear too, being replaced by RSS feeds and Twitter-type implementation. Electronic mail is the application that really kick-started the Internet but, in a relative short time, will be of little use at all.
For me, email is already, for the most part, just a way to communicate with people whom I do not know.