Why isn't email a government service?
I'm wondering if any of the folks here were "there" when there were battles about this (if there ever were any). Email seems to me like a good candidate for a government-provided electronic service. Even if management were contracted out to a private entity, providing emails to all residents of a geography (city/province/state/etc.) seems like a useful thing for government to do. You could use it as an official means of communication to residents, and provide a baseline for digital presence of your citizens. Email standards are now very mature and stable (enough so for every SME to be constantly iterating on their security abstractions). Why doesn't government provided email seem to exist anywhere? Universities do it. Why not government?
I can speculate about all kinds of reasons that this didn't happen, but I was too young to have watched the city council meetings where this might have been discussed. Does such a thing exist in China? Finland? Norway? The Netherlands? Anywhere?
Absolutely would not be a good candidate for a gov service in the US. Imagine the politicization currently applied to the Postal Service, but on the scale of everyone's email?
What you may be missing from the history of email is that when it started, it was never about universal communication. It was internal communication within your own organization or between connected orgs. Frankly, it was a bit of a revolution when it started to be able to route outside your own network. And it wasn't always across the internet - while certainly IP-based email existed on the early networks, there were also modem-based email networks which were used by local communities and even for cross-organization email systems.
So unless you consider the entire population of a country to be a single organization, it makes little sense for them to have looked into running an email service.
Because it's already distributed. Better targets for government services would be things that are owned by monopolies.
Self-hosted is the better way to do services, not centralised in the government.