Mathew Ingram has the issues with email down:

Obviously, my daughters won’t be teenagers forever. Eventually they will (I sincerely hope) get jobs and become productive members of society — at which point they will no doubt be forced to deal with the massive time-sucking drain on productivity that we call email. They too will get to enjoy the main feature of email: what some like to call an “audit trail” and others like to describe as “butt-covering.”

Let’s face it: by CC’ing everyone under the sun, sending long messages late on a Friday afternoon, including miscellaneous attachments for no reason and otherwise gumming things up, certain people achieve the appearance of work without actually having to do any -- and then when someone calls them on it they can say “but didn’t you get my email?” If Google or someone else can fix that , then more power to them.

Yeah, I have that experience with my daughter as well. The last time I saw her mouse cycle over mail.app on the Mac Mini, the red "unread messages" count was well over 100. She's mostly in IM, or specific web forums - email is simply not something she deals with on a regular basis.

I suspect email is the dead letter office for the next generation.