I'm not building MailProfessionale to compete with Google.
I'm building MailProfessionale because for over twenty years I've been convinced that Europe has given up its digital sovereignty far too easily.
I started working in this industry when the internet looked very different. Over the years I watched companies, public institutions and professionals hand over more and more critical functions to non-European platforms — until dependency became the norm.
For many people, that's inevitable.
For me, it never was.
For over twenty years I've repeated something that often earned me polite smiles: Europe shouldn't just follow the United States in the digital space. It should be a competitor — capable of building its own infrastructure, its own services and its own technologies.
Over time, that conviction has only grown stronger.
Geopolitical tensions, the return of openly protectionist policies in the United States, and events like the Fable situation have shown just how risky it is to build an entire digital economy on technologies developed almost exclusively elsewhere.
I don't believe the answer is to isolate ourselves from the world.
But I do believe Europe needs to be in a position to choose.
That's why I decided to invest practically everything I had in this project.
Not because anyone asked me to.
Not because it was the easy choice.
But because I didn't want to keep just criticising.
When someone asks me:
“What have you actually done to change this?”
I want to be able to answer:
“I built an alternative.”
Not perfect.
Not complete.
But real.
MailProfessionale is the first piece of something larger.
The goal isn't to create another email inbox.
The goal is to prove that it's possible to build a European digital ecosystem — with European infrastructure, European artificial intelligence and data that stays in Europe.
I'm not claiming I'll change the market single-handedly.
But I want to be able to say I did my part.
And if one day someone else builds the second piece, and someone else the third, then perhaps we will have stopped being simply users of technology made elsewhere — and become its builders again.