Toby Shapshak: "You can tell them that after 70 years living without e-mail, not having it [for two days] has left us bereft," my 82-year-old mother called to tell me as I sat down to write this column.

My intro was going to be: do you know your beloved e-mail is already extinct? According to Facebook, that is, whose newly launched messaging service now lets you send e-mails from a whoever@facebook.com address.

But, as my mother, and hundreds of millions of other people, can tell you, e-mail is far from over. Nor for that matter is Facebook's offering the "Gmail killer" that an excited technology press called it.

I might be an anachronism, because I do not spend a lot of time on Facebook, and I have been scared away by the numerous privacy lapses the social networking site has made.

Nor have I rushed out to see The Social Network, the movie about its founder Mark Zuckerberg and the site's formative years. (The movie seldom does justice to the book, as readers of Steig Larsson's Dragon Girl trilogy are busy discovering, even though they are fairly good films, because of the lack of nuance and subtlety.)

Zuckerberg wants you to give up your e-mail and migrate to Facebook entirely: once the repository of your social life, now the home of all your messaging - all stored in one central place, safely on Facebook's servers.

Much like Gmail's new Priority Inbox, which guesses which e-mails are more important than others, Facebook will organise your mail using your friends as a reference. The problem, as was immediately pointed out, is that sometimes people you don't know also send you e-mail - traffic fines and bills generally come from people you don't know.

Machines are smart, aided by complex algorithms, but like the movie version, they often lose the nuances.

Facebook's mail is a first attempt, and it will get better, but the current thinking is a little navel-gazing, it seems.

Facebook will also faithfully store all your dialogues with your friends forever, a handy thing for important messages - and yet another feature Gmail made popular.

I'm going to trust Google's ability to search for now, and its privacy policies.

My friend Andy Capostagno, the best rugby commentator in the country, once told me what a godsend e-mail was to him. Based in South Africa, he would write for a number of publications, including several in the UK.

Each had a different system, often requiring that he dial into their mainframe and manually upload his match reports or articles. Some had their own complicated programs and then there were the vagaries of having to use a 300 baud dial-up modem (think of these early devices as the bunny ears of the internet).

"E-mail took the strain out of my life as a journalist," he told me.

But here's the thing, neither my mother's generation nor mine nor Cappy's are the intended targets of Facebook's strategy. It's the youth - the digital born-frees - who have never heard of bunny ears nor dial-up modems. In their universe e-mail is something that you use to communicate with "old" people.

A few years ago the Pew Internet Study found that US teenagers only used e-mail to speak to authority figures like teachers and parents.

I've heard anecdotal stories about similar attitudes here, where MXit is the dominant youth messaging system.

Such instant messaging is their primary communication method, and increasingly social networks like Facebook or Twitter.

They have a different understanding of privacy and a different attitude to the future of communication.

There Ma, I told them.

• Shapshak is editor of Stuff magazine.