Ask HN: 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?