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A child born today sees email like we see the telegraph...

they'll grumpily sign up to gmail just so they can get a verification email, and that'll be all it gets used for. Messaging their irl friends will be done in apps like Discord.

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Truth.

lol I ran a sizeable team around 2020 and I had to educate a couple of our new hires straight from college that they actually needed to check their work email, after they missed important HR related stuff and they had just completely not realized it was an avenue for company communication, with an assumption that everything was available on our heavily used slack.

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tbh I'm with the zoomers on this one. Work email is 99% junk. Newsletters from every SaaS product we use, "A meeting started", invitations for calendar events that I can just accept ON the calendar, notifications for every transaction on every system ("X posted a comment on Y,") and spam from salespeople, recruiters, etc. And then 1% of it is actionable important stuff that I don't get through Slack.
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Email died because of the junk/spam issue. And it's self-fulfilling - when most emails are junk, nobody sends a love-letter or party invitation by email because the recipient probably won't notice it, which in turn lowers the usefulness even further.

If email was a commercial product, the company would have done something about that. Email died because it was an open platform, with nobody to address this systematic issue.

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From what I can tell most people do something like me@myname.whatever or hi@domain.
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Not to mention some of those kids may end up changing their names at some point if they get married and decide to take their partner’s last name.
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Aside: I'm honestly bewildered that Google doesn't have the ability to handle that in gmail accounts. If somebody gets married or otherwise needs to change their name, their answer is "just make a new google account" when all your stuff is still tied to the old account.
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They rolled this out in March this year in the US (and December last year in India).

I've successfully renamed an old account with an email address I no longer liked. It works quite well on everything 1st party, but does have the potential of causing issues with OAuth on poorly-coded websites that key on email instead of user ID (ie. most of them). You do get to keep your old email address though, so it still ends up working fine in practice.

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Holy crap really? Yay! I know a couple of trans folks that will be ecstatic.
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The feature is about fifteen years too late for me, unfortunately. By this point I need this feature to let me "merge Google accounts". But then I barely use Google anything anymore anyways.
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