Shortly after the height of the Merkel/NSA hacking scandal, when EU member states were most upset that US spying had been disclosed to their electorate (making EU politicians look weak in front of the voter). The EU kicked off an internal project to try and build a gmail replacement. Their plan was that customer number 1 would be all the educational establishments on the continent. They even got as far as checking out buildings to lease from paper manufacturers, to turn into data centres. Eventually that project went away, but I don't think we’ve seen the last of it yet.