Schleswig-Holstein completes migration to open source email

In short: 30k users, 40k mailboxes, 100M emails and calendar entries migrated. The client is Thunderbird. The server / web side is handled by Open-Xchange, hosted by a local provider with the same name (AFAICT), which also offers commercial licensing for the otherwise-AGPL suite.

yobbo2• 9 months ago

Open-Xchange is most likely a more effective name for the combination Cyrus IMAP, postfix, etc.

cycomanic• 9 months ago

Instead of guessing it's an easy lookup. OpenXchange is an app suite that's been around for >20 years. It's not some random ad hoc combination of software.

The email server underneath is dovecot btw.

Sauerlaender2• 9 months ago

The service gets operated by Dataport AöR. Dataport is the primary service provider / datacenter of some german federal states and owned by them.

They client is mainly Open-Xchange AppSuite Web UI, some people use Thunderbird on top. There are also thousands of mobile devices, syncing via IMAP, SMTP, CalDAV, CardDAV.

Aldipower3• 9 months ago

Schleswig-Holstein is even harder to pronounce then Massachusetts.

shevy-java2• 9 months ago

Hmmm. I am not sure.

"Hol" is short. Stein is like a beer keg or stein beer.

Schleswig is a bit awkward of a word. But Holstein should be easier, also there is the Holstein cow, black-white fur.

baxtr2• 9 months ago

What about Connecticut though?

flohofwoe2• 9 months ago

Arkansas takes the crown I think.

tclancy• 9 months ago

I just go with The Nutmeg State. Much clearer for everyone.

(As a RI/ NH New England lifer, I, as is typical of us, think of Connecticut as New York's attic: a place you hide that which you don't need anymore but it would be gauche to throw out.)

qwertfisch• 9 months ago

If you can read the phonetic alphabet, the pronunciation is given on both the German and English Wikipedia page for Schleswig-Holstein. But the English page gives an English variant, not the original (and correct) German pronunciation.

jschoe• 9 months ago

It's quite easy for English speakers.

Sh-less-wig Hole-stein or Shlayz-wig Hole-stein.

Aldipower3• 9 months ago

And this my friend is both not correct. :-) I am from Schleswig-Holstein btw..

timeon2• 9 months ago

Massachusetts

If English had proper 'c' (not just fake 'k' or 's') you could simplify it at least to: 'Massačusec'.

Similarly 'Schleswig' can be compressed to 'Šleswig'.

skylurk• 9 months ago

Why stop there? Maßačusec

markus_zhang2• 9 months ago

I vaguely remember this area from my history classes. Was it one of the two areas grabbed from Holland?

MarcusE1W• 9 months ago

jamesblonde2• 9 months ago

There was a war over it in 1864, as the Prussians grew to become Germany taking the land from Denmark.

https://en.wikipedia.org/wiki/Second_Schleswig_War

throw-qqqqq2• 9 months ago

Was it one of the two areas grabbed from Holland?

Denmark, but being dutch vs danish is very commonly confused/conflated in the US :D

markus_zhang2• 9 months ago

Ah my bad! Thanks for the clarification. The name is pretty special so it brought forward some memory.

flohofwoe2• 9 months ago

You're probably thinking of Denmark. TL;DR:

    Saxons => Danes ================> Prussia => Germany

Podrod• 9 months ago

Not quite.

https://en.wikipedia.org/wiki/Schleswig%E2%80%93Holstein_que...

shevy-java2• 9 months ago

This should be quicker. It is time to end the US hegemony in Europe.

JumpCrisscross4• 9 months ago

It is time to end the US hegemony in Europe

That only happens if Europe militarizes. The security guarantee, not Microsoft Office, underwrites the dependence.

timeon2• 9 months ago

Only guarantees Europe currently have are nuclear missiles in France and maybe UK.

avhception3• 9 months ago

German here. We need to get our shit together yesterday. But we're mostly just fumbling around.

ImJamal2• 9 months ago

Unfortunately for Europe, once Trump leaves they will forget all about building up their military.

not_that_d• 9 months ago

I wonder if they will dedicate resources to help the development of their open source tools?

rowanG077• 9 months ago

In stark contrast to the dutch taxes division moving fully to office 365 this month.

fanatic2pope• 9 months ago

Interesting. Apparently they are planning to spend €2 million a year just to keep manual backups of critical data in case the US cuts off access.

https://www.dutchnews.nl/2025/10/dutch-tax-office-moves-emai...

Ringz2• 9 months ago

Ok… that’s odd. Wouldn’t expect anything like this from the Dutch government, since they have a very progressive digital image in Europe.

usrnm• 9 months ago

For the past 15 years being progressive meant moving everything to the (US-owned) cloud

andrepd• 9 months ago

Image ≠ reality :)

vladms• 9 months ago

Netherlands is generally very sensitive to price, so if the US cloud (plus the 2 millions for the backup) was cheaper than the alternatives they gladly took it. Also, I would expect Microsoft offered them a big discount...

WhyNotHugo• 9 months ago

Even the infrastructure for .nl domain registration moved to the US (AWS IIRC).

There’s some Dutch governments organisations which are quite progressive, but others continue digging themselves deeps into MS/AWS.

jamesblonde2• 9 months ago

The Swedish tax authorities went all in on Azure. Insane. And screw solidarity with the Danes. We rent our digital infra, and now the Don extractive rents. He also threatens us if we want to have our own laws or, god forbid, support our own digital infra.

vee-kay4• 9 months ago

Indian government announced its decision recently to migrate the IT software of all its government offices and PSUs (public sector units) from Microsoft to Zoho (an India-based IT company, whose affordable products are good alternatives to Microsoft and Google's products).

Zoho has recently (re)launched Ulaa browser (Chromium fork, alternative to Chrome and Firefox) and Arattai (messenger app, alternative to Whatsapp and Singal), which are getting quite popular (Arattai and Ulaa topped Google Play Store recently in messenger and browser category).

https://www.newsbytesapp.com/news/science/meet-ulaa-zoho-s-a...

Ringz2• 9 months ago

Good news but it would be much better if Zoho would be committed to open source its software.

lewisjoe• 9 months ago

Just curious: why is committing to open-source an expectation? Is it a moral standard you hold of businesses or is it because of the govt adoption?

vee-kay4• 9 months ago

Corporates (even governmental companies/ departments) don't usually go for Open-Source since the code may not be maintained and there may not be any support.

This is why FOSS systems like Linux and OpenOffice are still not mainstream in the corporate world (though Linux rightfully dominates in the backend server market), whereas Microsoft rules the corporate world with its expensive software (Windows and MS-Office).

nextos• 9 months ago

Zoho is interesting in the sense that it is one of the few email providers I know of that lets you use a custom domain with one of their free plans.

Very startup friendly. Also free POP/IMAP, so you are not locked in.

vee-kay4• 9 months ago

Zoho's plans are very affordable and friendly for startups.

That affordability, quality and service is why Indian government is migrating its IT dependencies from Microsoft to Zoho.

iosjunkie• 9 months ago

That used to be the case. You can still get free email hosting, but POP/IMAP needs a paid plan.

navigate8310• 9 months ago

Being a closed-source stack, their CVE disclosures [0] paints quite a sorry picture, unless, of course, they’ve built such mind-blowing security that it makes Microsoft, Oracle, Salesforce and Google combined look like amateurs.

[0] https://www.cvedetails.com/vendor/14145/

danielscrubs• 9 months ago

You are criticising them for their lack of CVEs?

And to top it off you add Microsoft into your mentions, that just had a disastrous security bug, that was just mind blowing?

I get what you are saying but the FANG evangelism gotta stop. They are just like other huge companies. When was the last time your bank got hacked?

vee-kay4• 9 months ago

So you are comparing a Indian company (worth ~$12 billion) to worldwide giants worth hundreds of billions (or even trillions!) that make billions in a few days?

As of October 2025, Alphabet Inc. (Google's parent company) has a market capitalization of approximately $2.999 trillion. This figure represents the total market value of its outstanding shares.

tamimio• 9 months ago

It's a great move. I doubt it will add any substantial security measures, but the fact that more people -either individuals, organizations, or even governments- are disconnecting from the major big tech players is always a good sign and a healthy approach, especially when these few big companies are actively becoming hostile towards their users with different money-grab tactics and invasive technologies. Add to that AI craziness, and you are not a user anymore but a minion or a drone to such companies.

kwar134• 9 months ago

It is really important to not build your national infrastructure around closed-source proprietary software that other nations control.

I lived in Latin America for a year. It is shocking how much everything relies on WhatsApp. I got everything from visa appointments, airline tickets, to restaurant bookings in WhatsApp.

Huge national security in my view.

clvx• 9 months ago

It used to piss me off now I despise it.

Another massive problem is if Meta has a fit with your organization, they can ban you from using WhatsApp for Business. All these Latam countries should and must pass regulations to avoid this kind of behavior. Free market all you want but if you captured market, it’s the nation’s responsibility to ensure their people can get the best service even if these companies are hating each other.

kwar134• 9 months ago

I'm a capitalist but yes when national security is in play "free market" in my book doesn't apply. You can't have health appointments, airline tickets, government services by default on WhatsApp. Most don't even bother with email and just default to WhatsApp.

It was kind of the same but not as pervasive with Facebook Messenger in the Philippines.

f1shy3• 9 months ago

Yes. Absolutf*kingeverything is whatsup. That was annoying at the beginning.

But: people there are practical and flexible. It would take days to a month to migrate, what is impossible in first world, just take Germany as an example.

Also whatsapp is e2e encrypted, so not so bad. In Germany many things go over FAX or mail, totally unencrypted…

croemer• 9 months ago

What is "firat world"?

jowea2• 9 months ago

Yeah it is annoying on principle having everything on WP but it's not the worst piece of software (yet). I think I would rather have it than the American system and their blue bubbles vs green bubbles or fragmentation between multiple incompatible and shitty proprietary messaging systems.

17186274402• 9 months ago

I think we should have regular shut offs for software like we have for emergency and fire situations. This would show the general population HOW reliant they are on some companies software.

kwar134• 9 months ago

So weird how HN ranking system works. Same article submitted 2 days ago barely got any traction:

https://news.ycombinator.com/item?id=45538928

Nathanael_M2• 9 months ago

I hope we get regular updates. Email deliverability is a frustration outside of the M365/Gmail ecosystems, but it’s not as bad as it’s sometimes made out to be, and I’m optimistic that increased rigour with the implementation of SPF/DMARC/DKIM will lead to better deliverability across the board. I’m curious if they see increases/decreases in spam, missed messages, successful phishing attempts, etc. Lastly, I’d love to know if they have had to change any security policies, and how are they handling identity management across the organization.

stackskipton• 9 months ago

As former email admin, it’s not bad if someone is dedicated to it and you have your own block of IP. It’s frustrating for self hosting because lack of your IPs and most people don’t want spend free time on this busy work.

dingdingdang• 9 months ago

Even if you do ALL the techinical work you can still find yourself banned/ignored as I learned years ago the hard way.. even big providers outside MS/Goog duopoly finds themselves partially unable to deliver business emails at times.. fun times for a small shop (not).

dminuoso• 9 months ago

We operate an MSP business for tens of thousands of customers and have our own ASN, but gmail outright refuses all our corporate email. Why? We do not know and gmail refuses to tell us. Their postmaster tools lie, are incomplete, display no data, display errors or contain no useful information. There is no human postmaster to contact, all our attempts have been ignored successfully. It’s downright silly but we have to send our corporate mail via a paid third party relay to be delivered to gmail.

These gmail postmaster tools seems to exist to make antitrust cases difficult, not to enable other MSPs to deal with deliverability issues.

At the same time gmail is emerging as the number one source of spam for our customers. If our spam fighting is too tight we falsely flag important mail as spam, and this is absolutely unacceptable to customers. As a consequence we have to relax our spam classification for gmail senders, which manifests itself in false negatives from the perspective of our customer.

But to the customers this reflects on us, not on gmail.

It’s just gmails best interests to make other MSPs miserable to operate. It drives our users to them.

gucci-on-fleek• 9 months ago

Email deliverability is a frustration outside of the M365/Gmail ecosystems, but it’s not as bad as it’s sometimes made out to be […] I’m curious if they see increases/decreases in spam, missed messages, successful phishing attempts, etc.

It's probably not much of an issue in this specific case. If someone doesn't get your email, that's your (the sender's) problem; but if someone doesn't get the government's email, then that's their (the recipient's) problem.

c0balt• 9 months ago

To add to this, most emails are likely within the organization and/or between public institution.

E-Mail was (last time I checked) not an approved medium for delivery of important documents as it does not (per design) have a mandatory receipt of the message being delivered. So a citizens does not need to worry a lot about this for important documents/mail.

(Fax was so popular for public institutions in Germany because it satisfied this standard. It meant it usually was the lowest barrier option and you could rely on it for all (un)important documents)

freeopinion• 9 months ago

Are you suggesting that people who want to communicate with their government might have to have an account with a service that is not M365/GMail?

And?

mfuzzey• 9 months ago

I think we're going to be seeing more and more of this type of thing in Europe. Of course some administrations have already done it before, sometimes sucessfully, like the French gendarmerie and sometimes unsuccesfully like Munich that ended up reverting to Windows (mostly for political rather than technical reasons).

But previously the motivations were difficult to understand for many, either being about saving money on licenses with dubious returns once retraining was considered or about software freedom arguments that are difficult to explain to non geeks.

These days the US is increasingly seen as an untrustworthy partner / supplier in Europe and the digital digital sovereignty arguments are well understood, both by politicians and the general public.

zenmac3• 9 months ago

This is just the result of shifting from the uni-polar world to the multi-polar world. Guess this is just one phenomenon of the poles shifting.

Hope this will result in gain for FOSS and the community.

pjmlp3• 9 months ago

Even though I tend to bash a bit the whole evolution of Linux Desktop, that is more a complaint of where I wish things to be, than being a naysayer.

FOSS stacks seem the only way with current geopolitics, but there is a big but.

For proper freedom it would only work out if we got back the whole infrastructure from hardware, software, compiler toolchains, everything like in the cold war days, throughout the 8 and 16 bit home computers as well, however I doubt we would go back that far.

LudwigNagasena• 9 months ago

Most FOSS organisations, including the Linux Foundation, are headquartered in the US and are supported by American companies and, most likely, American three letter agencies.

number62• 9 months ago

Yes, but they work differently. Due to their decentralised nature there is not one switch they can turn to shut off their services or programmes. US companies can be ordered to stop their services for certain organisations, individuals or states

Vuizur• 9 months ago

I think migrating away from office is not realistic for many companies. They run on Excel, and just breaking one vital table because it uses a macro can cost much more money than the entire office suite for many users over years. The Munich story was doomed to fail. (Of course there are lots of things that work, the open source mail or Zoom or Slack replacements are totally fine in my opinion.)

KnowledgeWeaver• 9 months ago

Munich: The backend infrastructure still is open source, only the frontend was reverted to Windows. So we're halfway there.

hadrien01• 9 months ago

France is currently developing La Suite numérique[1], which includes email based on Open-Xchange. The German federal government also proposes Open-Xchange in their openDesk suite[2].

[1] https://lasuite.numerique.gouv.fr/ [2] https://www.opendesk.eu/en/product#email

N19PEDL2• 9 months ago

Another missed opportunity to make a EU-wide project.

LauraMedia• 9 months ago

On one hand, yes. There should be a good EU-wide easy to adopt system.

On the other hand, the more people are involved, the slower progress is. And It makes sense to accelerate nationally and then combine EU-wide later on.

Stranger432• 9 months ago

Why would we even want that, the whole point is to break the monoculture and single vendor dependency not to create an new mostly irrelevant one to be stuffed with has-been and rejects from the national levels the way most of EU's big prestige projects end up being run.

One of the thing that sets EU apart from most federations is that it kind of enables a lot more regional independence in how things are actually implemented while still guaranteeing the rights of the individual citizens, this lead to a lot of dynamism at the local level despite the failings of the central level, and allow this kind of projects to succeed and create paths for others to follow at their own pace.

palata• 9 months ago

As long as it's open source, it's a win. Other countries can eventually choose to contribute/fork from one of those.

pjmlp3• 9 months ago

Great and I wish they keep at it.

However we have gotten multiple efforts in Germany that have been rolled back after a new administration takes over.

A few years ago there were a few libraries in NRW using SuSE, and nowadays it is Windows on kiosk mode.

figassis2• 9 months ago

If more of this happens, especially in email, maybe Google, Microsoft and friends will be forced to democratize their email blacklisting. When countries start suing because email from government agencies is not getting to their citizens, these lists will hopefully get more decentralized.

ImJamal2• 9 months ago

What do you mean by democratize their blacklisting? Like having people vote for who is blacklisted?

figassis2• 9 months ago

I mean being transparent and provide a direct means for recourse.

stego-tech2• 9 months ago

Been saying it for years: the name of the (IT) game through 2030 and beyond won't be AI, so much as it'll be sovereignty. Everyone played the US' game and got relatively burned to varying degrees, so expect more countries utilize homegrown or FOSS products to retain sovereignty over their digital infrastructure going forward.

johnebgd• 9 months ago

Population decline and climate change impact may not provide enough surpluses in capital for specific areas to invest in reinventing various solutions unless AI makes the cost extremely low.

Swenrekcah• 9 months ago

You raise a valid point, the resources we will have to put towards climate mitigation and dealing with extreme events will be a drain on productivity in other areas. However I think that will mostly be the case for “real” technology, I think capacity to produce software will be minimally affected even if there was no AI.

stego-tech2• 9 months ago

Everyone likes to trot out “bUt ThE cApItAl” as an excuse to justify their current thing they’re really into, but the fact is that every single time a cause becomes important enough to fund, we always find the money somehow.

This time will be no different. If your choices are sovereignty or subjugation, most organizations will fight for sovereignty when pressed beyond a breaking point or the math adds up in their favor. It might mean pulling funds from highly speculative fields or investments (y’know, like AI) in favor of more immediate benefits and gains, and everyone’s calculus is different, but to those for whom sovereignty is more important the capital will inevitably be found.

jowea2• 9 months ago

I think the big thing will be FOSS solutions. That way the Europeans, Chinese, contrarian Americans, Russian, etc can use the same code and share capital costs without actually having to trust each other.

MaxPock• 9 months ago

Of course you don't want to wake up one day and you can't access your mails because the US government doesn't like you. . Huawei had to develop an in-house solution after SAP cut them off.

account42• 9 months ago

Huawei had to develop an in-house solution after SAP cut them off.

Every organization should be so lucky.

sgc• 9 months ago

SAP is a German company that was pressured by the US government (surely with EU blessing - Huawei still has too much control over foreign infrastructure). I guess the lesson is that every country has to replicate software autarchy, and the easiest way for all but the largest countries is through FOSS.

pessimizer• 9 months ago

The rest of the world has had forever to do sovereignty, and the blessing of a FOSS ecosystem (that doesn't exist in fully 85% of alternate universes) which would make it absurdly easy. Europe has the same bosses as everybody else, and they pretty much pilot authoritarian overreach there before they try it in the US against a stronger constitution and clear Bill of Rights.

The reason Europe isn't independent is because they like that the US goes through their citizens' data, and are happy for Microsoft (or whoever, I guess Palantir, Crowdstrike, and 18 Israeli military startups) to package it up and send it to them. They love to not spend on tech and talk the future, just like they love to not spend on the military and talk tough.

The reason they talk about US tech domination is to whip up a "nationalism" which is, of course, an EU federalism and a usurpation of the self-determination of the various nations of Europe for the sake of the deep pockets that dogwalk the EU to where they want it to be. It also keeps France and Germany in the center of Europe forever. They don't talk about "tech independence" because they mean anything by it.

They've had 30 years to grab FOSS and run with it, and infinite cash. Instead, you got cookie banners, social media monitoring, and in a minute, chat control.

The only people who are seriously working on digital sovereignty are the Chinese.

edit: I'd like to add that I'm all for Europe going all-in on FOSS, or (less-so) even coming up with a full proprietary ecosystem completely independent of US tech overlords. This would be nothing but a benefit to me. It will just never, ever happen. Any European who would be expected to pay for it is already heavily invested with US tech overlords, because billionaires aren't nationalists, they're narcissists.

surfingdino• 9 months ago

Props! I hope they keep it and don't use it as a play to get a better deal from a commercial provider. I am jaded after seeing too many "digital transformation" projects running on a 3-5 year cycle of switching from Offie 365 to Google then back to Office 365.

aetherspawn• 9 months ago

I’m going to float a compromise that works pretty well and helped us get off Office with absolutely minimal effort…

Exchange Online Plan 1 (the cheapest, no Office)

Apple Mail (Active Sync), Pages, Numbers, Keynote (all free, perpetually, and mobile apps are available)

Since these are packaged as store apps, we still get basic MDM and the ability to deploy/autoconfigure/autoupdate. Active Sync allows us to get email notifications in near real-time to mobile devices (which is otherwise difficult), as well as wipe emails remotely on lost devices if we need to.

We get data sovereignty by using a Synology NAS, which has a Task to encrypt everything and upload it to Cloudflare R2 as a backup. We could really use any NAS solution, but so far Synology is hands free and can sync everyone’s emails from Exchange to the backup.

Will ditch Exchange when someone finally starts an antitrust on Microsoft/Google email hosting.

andybak• 9 months ago

The Schleswig-Holstein email migration is so complicated, only three men in Europe have ever understood it. One was Prince Albert, who is dead. The second was a German professor who became mad. I am the third and I have forgotten all about it.

avhception3• 9 months ago

Oh, sounds like Microsoft needs to move their German headquarter again.

runxel• 9 months ago

Good luck to them!

On a nother note: still 1+ year(s) until we get a real email database (enabling gmail like thread view) in TB. [0]

[0] https://blog.thunderbird.net/2025/10/video-conversation-view...

Piraty• 9 months ago

If they (and every public body doing the same move) now start donating 50% of their previous costs to the FOSS projects they, that would most notably put mozilla in a much better position to not have to bow to google money and go down the route they did lately.

Stranger432• 9 months ago

Why do we want them to donate money rather then time/people.

Schleswig-Holstein completes migration to open source email

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