2,100 Swiss municipalities showing which provider handles their official email

by doener • 3 months ago

237 69 3 months ago

Related ongoing thread: Swiss authorities want to reduce dependency on Microsoft - https://news.ycombinator.com/item?id=47827383

jeffbee5• 3 months ago

TBQH it's crazy to have 2,100 distinct choices. Why isn't there a national-level host that frees municipalities from having to think about it?

nelox• 3 months ago

Freedom

clbrmbr2• 3 months ago

Switzerland is apparently a federation of federations. Local self-determination. Amazing place if you ask me would move back there in a heartbeat.

clbrmbr2• 3 months ago

They also (at the cantonal level) have disparate education systems, with classes and grade levels mismatching between neighboring cantons. Yet, if you check what typical Swiss high school students are actually leaning (say at College de Candolle in Geneva), they are learning 3–5 languages, real literary analysis, and set theory. So somehow it’s working despite not having some perfect plan handed down by central authority. Hmm.

jeffbee5• 3 months ago

Well, without advocating that municipalities would be compelled to use it, isn't there at least some national service that they could opt into? I am sure that most of the red on this map is because it's a cinch to get Microsoft or Google to host your email. Of course in California we consider GSuite itself to be the green choice.

GaryBluto• 3 months ago

Switzerland is apparently a federation of federations.

And three republics! Geneva, Ticino, and Neuchâte.

apnorton• 3 months ago

TBQH it's crazy to have 2,100 distinct choices.

It's crazy to have 2100 distinct municipalities? The site isn't showing "here are 2100 different email hosts that municipalities in Switzerland use," but rather "here are the 2100 municipalities in Switzerland, and if you click you can see what host each one uses."

There's plenty of overlap, just from a cursory look.

toast0• 3 months ago

I dunno. I live in washington state, in a county, a city, a fire district, a public utility district, a library district, a park district, a school district, a transportation district, and probably one or two other things. Some of them share borders with the city, but not all of them, and my city happens to be an island which makes sharing borders easy.

There's lots of reasons to separate municipal agencies, even if they cover the same geography, so it doesn't surpise me that each canton has about 100 municpal agencies.

rzwitserloot• 3 months ago

Switserland is a true confederation. It consists of 26 cantons and in most ways each canton is sovereign.

As an example, swiss cantons are considerably more independent from the Swiss Confederacy (i.e. what most people know and call 'Switserland' the entity) than the states of the USA are.

As an example of how far that goes: Switzerland essentially does not have a capital. The cantons usually do, though. Bern is the seat of the Federal Assembly and is usually considered the capital, more because social norms and systems are based on the notion that all countries must have one.

Swiss cantons can work together and often do, but evidently, not on this.

vrganj• 3 months ago

Even things like citizenship and elections are fully decentralized, which has some.. interesting outcomes sometimes, like the fact that one canton didn't allow women's suffrage until 1990 (!) [0] or that a lady who's lived there for 34 years had her citizenship application denied because the local dairy farmers found her animal rights activism "annoying". [1]

[0] https://en.wikipedia.org/wiki/Women%27s_suffrage_in_Switzerl... [1] https://www.bbc.com/news/newsbeat-38595807

kgwgk2• 3 months ago

It’s a federal republic like the US and many others. (Edit to add: « federal state » may be s better term.)

DANmode2• 3 months ago

What improvement?

jeffbee5• 3 months ago

You wouldn't end up contracting with some weird local nerds for critical systems?

doener• 3 months ago

Via https://news.ycombinator.com/item?id=47827716

zephyreon• 3 months ago

Posts like these always give me a moment of pause to reflect just how expansive the global internet is.

totetsu• 3 months ago

I wonder how that one county ended up on infomaniak https://www.infomaniak.com/ Edit: (Looks like there are a few)

perotid• 3 months ago

Which county do you mean? Can you elaborate? Thanks.

veleek• 3 months ago

I found at least three counties using that hosting provider by just clicking around randomly, so I’m not sure what the context is for that comment.

Petit-Val (BE) and Evolène (VS) are two.

reddalo• 3 months ago

Infomaniak is Swiss, so it makes sense that the municipality decided to go with a local service.

sam_lowry_2• 3 months ago

Also mxmap.nl and mxmap.be and there is Norvegian map at kommune-epost-norge.netlify.app

I remember seing the Swedish map as well but can't find it now.

Huppie• 3 months ago

The Swedish one was linked on the Belgian map: https://swedish-mail-dependency.netlify.app/

amoshebb• 3 months ago

Wow, I knew it was true but this may really drives home just how much the netherlands is a microsoft shop.

sam_lowry_2• 3 months ago

Bert Hubert wrote about it at length since a few years already https://berthub.eu/articles/

BobbyTables2• 3 months ago

Warms my heart that it is not all divided between Google and Microsoft…

chrisandchris2• 3 months ago

Be careful, the self-hosted may just be an out-of-date Exchange On-Premises.

technion• 3 months ago

The first example I looked at was haute-sorne.ch, which is reported by this tool as "Self hosted/other". Whilst it's true that they appear to self host, https://mails.haute-sorne.ch will land you on a Microsoft Exchange server, patch level 15.2.1748.39.

This is better than typical, being an October 2025 patch. But that leaves open CVE-2025-64667, CVE-2025-64666 and CVE-2026-21527. Which are vulnerabilities with patches out going back months.

Now are these RCEs? No, but this was also the first example I looked at.

soco• 3 months ago

Like Aeugst am Albis reports self-hosted, with: "MS365 tenant detected: Managed". But what I don't see, is other cloud office solution providers. Like, it's either hyperscalers or "self hosted". Why no cloud, sovereign even, alternatives?

Edit: there are (Infomaniak...), it was just Firefox json search who failed me :)

eliemichel• 3 months ago

MX in Swiss/Europe does not mean it is not Google or Microsoft. Just checked out the French equivalent linked above, it says things like "MX for outlook.com in European Union [green checkbox]"

dkga2• 3 months ago

I am curious: can something like this be used to check the provider handling the e-mails of, say, groups of companies? I ask this because I am a research economist, and part of my research is in the intersection of tech and economics/finance. So for example, I would be delighted to check the e-mail providers of S&P 500 companies and then check whether outages or bad news related to their e-mail providers (proxying for their broader application) also translates to lower returns in the client firms.

slow_typist• 3 months ago

Like municipalities, companies have domains. So in short, yes, if you have a list of domains of the population you are interested in. The DNS tells which server handles incoming email, that is public information. The detection part (who is the provider, what kind of system do they use) can be trickier. You have probably noted the confidence levels given if you click on a certain municipal body. It could be fingerprinting, standard tool to do this would be nmap, or interpretation of the DNS responses, or a combination, or something else (like sending emails and hoping for a response that tells something about the system it went through).

jbrob• 3 months ago

To do it manually, have a look at e.g. https://toolbox.googleapps.com/apps/dig/#MX/ and enter a domain name (say total.com). Here you'll see that total.com uses outlook.com as their e-mail service. Given a list of domains, something like this can be automated easily enough.

gwittel• 3 months ago

Yes. In the past I helped sort out tooling like this for competitive analysts. There are a few ways this is done:

1) Check the businesses’ MX record. Often this points to a third party provider like Microsoft or Google. 2) Connect to the mail server identified in the MX record. Sometimes these have banners that identify the vendor (vs something generic like sendmail) 3) Email headers from messages sent to users in the company (or sometimes a bounce). Often these have headers from one or more providers. You’ll have to sort out the path to understand which bits were added by the sender/recipient path though.

These days often companies have multiple providers (security) so they might have one at the edge (mx) and more internal hops. You can usually see these in the headers.

jmorenoamor• 3 months ago

It's 6AM here, and I've been wondering for quite some secomds why blue municipalities do not work.

Yeah, have a nice day everyone.

jo-m• 3 months ago

They have problems due to high humidity in the server room ;)

vvpan• 3 months ago

I clicked on a few as well

user_of_the_wek• 3 months ago

Obviously this blue part here is the land

jerven• 3 months ago

Funnily enough, for a long time the lakes of Switzerland had been stuffed into a database table of municipalities at SwissTopo for 2 decades before that was refactored out. Or at least I recall having heard this story.

bblb• 3 months ago

This whole reactionist protectionist sovereignity fuss will blow over in a year or two. Way too costly to force mass migrate gazillion users and services. Even if just to move away from AD and Entra. Forget about it. Local gov all around the world is stuck with these permanently.

One little hint to all the European providers: just provide a better and more cost effective service than the US competitors, and the users will come. Innovate something new and interesting. Don't just copy paste Microsoft, Amazon and Apple.

(disclaimer: I work in European municipality IT infra)

pseudony• 3 months ago

Sure — we can play that game. Worked for a state org in an EU country too.

I disagree, I note that multiple countries have digital ministries drafting plans to drop Microsoft products or to begin a wholesale migration due to sovereignty and security.

Once something becomes policy at the highest levels, the individual orgs will have to follow, even if slowly.

I really think you are grossly misreading the last 12 months or so. There is a big difference between a municipality migration as a cost-saving move and the very state saying declaring a national security threat from foreign-based vendors.

gherkinnn• 3 months ago

Gaining (more) strategic independence, costly as it may be, is cheaper than the potential price a deranged US government can inflict.

We have >3 more years of Trump, that is plenty of time to get a ball rolling. I hope Europe finally does what we should have done in 2016 and gains more independence.

hex-m• 3 months ago

I'd love a Thunderbird extension that shows where the mailboxes I correspond with are hosted.

surmoi• 3 months ago

France has the same done officially to evaluate if public local entities can benefit from our soverein open source office suite https://suiteterritoriale.anct.gouv.fr/conformite/cartograph...

throwaway2037• 3 months ago

Really: Zero for OVHcloud or Hetzner? I find it hard to believe!

dewey2• 3 months ago

I wouldn't really say that's these are the first names that would come to mind if you think about someone to host your emails especially when IP reputation matters.

sixhobbits• 3 months ago

I'm not a microsoft fan at all but European governments have tried to get away from it a few times and I don't think it's ever been very successful.

People are familiar with Microsoft, and for all of their problems they do know what governments are actually solving for which smaller providers often don't understand.

Just today I had to configure a swedish-based email provider and it felt like going back to the 90s. There were three different web portals, each with a separate login, and one I can't log into at all so I just get an error ,the other lets me configure some email settings, and the third lets me view my email and configure some other settings.

European software often feels like this scene from Succession where rich guy says to his children "I love you, but you're not serious people" compared to US equivalents to me.

Random green square

    iz-net.ch swiss smtp.iz-net.ch
    weloveyou.systems unknown spf.mail.weloveyou.systems
    imc-hosting.com unknown spf.imc-hosting.com
    abxsec.com swiss spf.abxsec.com
    tophost.ch swiss _spf.tophost.ch
    iz-net.ch swiss spf.iz-net.ch

Random red square

    Microsoft hyperscaler hasle-ch.mail.protection.outlook.com
    Microsoft hyperscaler spf.protection.outlook.com

I'd love for them to reduce their microsoft dependency, but not at the cost of whatever weloveyou.systems is

FabCH2• 3 months ago

People in this thread are missing an interesting perspective:

We could, if we really wanted to, actually force this issue via referendum. It takes only 100k signatures to force a vote at the federal level, and less at lower levels.

It wouldn’t be the weirdest thing we voted on…

7777777phil• 3 months ago

In 2018 the Swiss voted if cows are allowed to have horns (1). It was called the horned cow initiative.

(1) https://www.admin.ch/en/horned-cow-initiative

LadyCailin• 3 months ago

Switzerland? Cows? I can’t help but be reminded of https://m.youtube.com/watch?v=ySxyPMZkrwU

derelicta• 3 months ago

Ahahah it's always funny to see my old employer on this website. What's more crazy is that they appeared twice, and they are really not that important lol

logictyler• 3 months ago

This is actually a really cool angle on something most people never think about. You can literally see dependency patterns instead of just talking about them in the abstract.

The referendum point is interesting too—there aren’t many countries where something like vendor choice for public infrastructure could realistically become a public vote.

2,100 Swiss municipalities showing which provider handles their official email

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