Is it at all likely that email will become 'a thing of the past' any time soon?

There is much talk of Slack replacing email within organisations. But not necessarily within social circles. IRC, Skype and the like have been doing the rounds for years, but never actually supplanting the king of comms.

One-to-many options such as social networks, blogs and RSS feeds certainly account for much exchanging of information nowadays, but again, we still have email. Lots and lots of email.

Looking to the future, some folks, like Donald Knuth, have abstained altogether[0], while others envisage an open, encrypted, p2p, blockchain-based protocol that enables file-transfer and even voice/video calls[1].

Is it likely that we'll ever find a solution to overcome email's spam, inefficiency and security weaknesses, or will we just keep on under the weight of a creaking ruin that just manages to stay standing?

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[0] http://www-cs-faculty.stanford.edu/~uno/email.html

[1] That'd be me. No, not Bitmessage and no, not XMPP.