Elon Musk teased the internet with an X post about “Xmail” as a potential rival to Gmail, which sparked trolling among fans and critics.
Musk doubled down on a conversation he started earlier in February, when he claimed to be developing a new email service called Xmail, seemingly coming for Gmail’s 1.8 billion users.
“When we making XMail?” asked X security engineer, Nate McGrady, to which Musk replied, “It’s coming.”
Today Musk reignited the conversation, setting his target on Gmail, which is owned by Google. The topic quickly became the No. 2 trending conversation on X with 22,600 posts talking about it.
“Interesting,” Musk wrote on X. “We need to rethink how messaging, including email, works overall.”
Musk wrote his reply after Nima Owji, an independent app researcher, commented, “Having an @x.com email address is the only thing that can stop me from using Gmail!”
The post had 16.9 million views after it was published at 12:46 pm. Sunday.
Musk’s news was met with humor, with many memes trolling the idea of abandoning Gmail for Xmail, considering X’s questionable key changes about collecting users’ biometric data.
“X wanting ppl to replace their GMAL with X mail,” said user, @TrumpDownfall in an X post, and followed by a meme of Natasha Robinson and Amanda Seales hysterically laughing in a scene from the TV show Insecure.
A user named @KirbyMiningCo said in an X post, “Nobody throwing out their Gmail accounts for an X email service lol.”
Nobody throwing out their gmail accounts for an X email service lol
— Kirby Mining Co. 🪐 (@KirbyMiningCo) December 15, 2024
While some users on X were ready to sign up for Musk’s undeveloped Xmail account, the general consent was not favorable for Musk on Reddit.
“Ha, and I cannot stress this enough, ha,” said commenter, DeliciousPumpkinPie, 10 months ago in the Subreddit r/technology, that published, “Elon Musk to Take on Gmail With New Xmail Service.”
“Yeah, hard pass on that,” said an anonymous commenter with over 200 upvotes on Reddit, while another commenter asked, “Who the [expletive] would trust this person with their email?”
According to the Express Tribune, Gmail makes up 30.70 percent of the email market with Apple Mail leading the way with 53.67 percent. About 10 percent use Outlook, Google Android, and Yahoo! Mail.
