Seth has a great post over here asking if email is on it’s way out.
The gist of the post is that email is very web1.0 and will eventually be superseded by something bigger, better and more web based (which sounds a little counter intuitive). Or at least something more akin to an open, organic and dynamic service that email currently isn’t.
I think Seth was a little optimistic with his time estimates, incumbency equals inertia and it’ll take a lot to drag email down. It’s become ingrained in our collective psyche in the same way that standard delivery television and landlines have.
And yes both those things will pass but much less rapidly than could be possible.
Ben Kepes is an analyst, an entrepreneur, a commentator and a business adviser. His business interests include a diverse range of industries from manufacturing to property to technology. As a technology commentator he has a broad presence both in the traditional media and extensively online. Ben covers the convergance of technology, mobile, ubiquity and agility, all enabled by the Cloud. His areas of interest extend to enterprise software, software integration, financial/accounting software, platforms and infrastructure as well as articulating technology simply for everyday users. 
[...] a very smart fellow Cantabrian who’s blogging up a storm about SaaS lately suggests my prediction of 5-10 years of useful life left in the standard email platform might be a little [...]
I think that if email has to be out in about 10 years, then the new thing emerging perhaps would be still be email but in a different form as we know it today. It is hard to predict what that might be, whatever replaces email in 10 years time.