Officially, the Académie Française recommends the word for email be "mél" for message électronique (lit. Electronic message). In practice everybody says mail or email, but the official word is voluntarly chosen to not be the English word, as the Académie often does.
The French are still mad that their language is no longer the Lingua Franca and has been supplanted by English, so they (or at least the academic types) really hate English borrow-words. Most other languages don't have this inferiority complex.
