> Try teaching those same "older people" how to read and respond to their email on the command line and see how far you get in the same amount of time.

Again, you are overestimating the difficulty involved here. You type "mail" to enter the mail program. Then you hit the return key to read your next mail message. You can type "r" to reply, or "d" to delete it. Type "q" to quit.

It's really not that hard.