> How hard is it to write an email client? > With some calendar? > Is it complete rocket surgery or something in the realms of feasibly possible? Oh dearie.

> How hard is it to write an email client? > With some calendar? > Is it complete rocket surgery or something in the realms of feasibly possible? Oh dearie. Thus began every single failed multi-million-dollar software project in the history of software. > Wasn't gmail some 20%-er time by a couple of guys at Google? I don't think it took years or billions to get up and running. A: The feature-set of GMail as is released in 2004 is unlikely to impress someone used to Outlook/Exchange B: What a correctly motivated Google-quality engineer can cook up in a few years (which is apparently how long GMail was in development before release) has little to no correlation to what a government can procure from a systems integrator. Also, I don't recall the calendar being worth much back them. Maybe, maybe, maybe if they hired Google-grade engineers, paid them Google salaries and gave them Google-freedom to work on this, they might be able to pull it off. But that's a lot harder than it sounds. EDIT: > do something on its own about securing government communications It's not hard to secure an email installation - its interface to the internet at large is super small and well understood (SMTP). Most likely NSA grabs the mail they want from outside the installation by sniffing unencrypted network traffic. A worthwhile effort, and one quite suitable for a government even, is to get people to encrypt their emails.