Mentioning the original Gmail seems a bit of a red herring. Surely the community would expect something closer to 2014's Gmail (which is the product of tens of

Mentioning the original Gmail seems a bit of a red herring. Surely the community would expect something closer to 2014's Gmail (which is the product of tens of millions of dollars of engineer-hours, even if you skip all of the advertising-enabling gunk that an open-source clone would surely skip) before a theoretical Gmail clone got any kind of traction. A clone that approaches "modern" Gmail is absolutely possible, of course. My original "Are you serious?" was just a bit of incredulity aimed at the person who asked "Hey, why isn't anybody on this yet? Is it hard?" Possible? Yes. Hard? Yes.