NEW DELHI: Home minister Amit Shah on Wednesday announced on X that he has switched his e-mail correspondence address from ‘gmail’ platform — owned by American tech giant Google — to Zoho Mail, operated by the 100% Indian-owned company Zoho Corporation.“Hello everyone. I have switched to Zoho Mail. Kindly note the change in my email address. My new email address is amitshah.bjp@zohomail.in. For future correspondence via mail, kindly use this address,” he posted on X. He signed off with “Thank you for your kind attention to this matter”, a familiar ending line of US president Donald Trump’s posts on Truth Social.The Indian tech multinational firm Zoho Corporation was founded in 1996 by Sridhar Vembu, Tony Thomas and Shailesh Kumar Davey. Zoho is headquartered in Chennai, Tamil Nadu, India, and has offices in nearly 80 countries. Shah’s switch to a ‘swadeshi’ software-as-a-service (SaaS) email platform comes in the middle of BJP’s three-month ‘Har Ghar Swadeshi’ campaign aimed at promoting made-in-India items.A few years ago, Shah and several ministers in the Narendra Modi govt had joined Koo — a desi microblogging platform that was meant to rival Twitter (now X) — with much fanfare, giving it an instant push and visibility. Eventually, however, Koo — co-founded by entrepreneurs Aprameya Radhakrishna and Mayank Bidawatka — failed to live up to the hype and was recently shut down due to “the funding winter”.In 1996, Indian-American businessman Sabeer Bhatia had founded ‘hotmail’, a free web-based email service. Two years later in 1998, US software company Microsoft acquired hotmail for an estimated $400 million. It later rebranded ‘hotmail’ as ‘Outlook’.