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

133 points by doener 8 hours ago

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

sam_lowry_ - 3 hours 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.

jmorenoamor - 2 hours 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 - an hour ago

They have problems due to high humidity in the server room ;)
vvpan - 43 minutes ago

I clicked on a few as well

zephyreon - 7 hours ago

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

BobbyTables2 - 3 hours ago

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

chrisandchris - 2 hours ago

Be careful, the self-hosted may just be an out-of-date Exchange On-Premises.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

hex-m - 34 minutes ago

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

dkga - 2 hours 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 - 2 hours 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).

totetsu - 5 hours ago

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

reddalo - 30 minutes ago

Infomaniak is Swiss, so it makes sense that the municipality decided to go with a local service.
perotid - 5 hours ago

Which county do you mean? Can you elaborate? Thanks.
- veleek - 4 hours 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.

doener - 7 hours ago

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

maryjeiel - 5 hours ago

[dead]

jeffbee - 7 hours 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?

rzwitserloot - 6 hours 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 hours 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
clbrmbr - 7 hours ago

Switzerland is apparently a federation of federations. Local self-determination. Amazing place if you ask me would move back there in a heartbeat.
- clbrmbr - 7 hours 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.
  - jeffbee - 7 hours ago
    
    OK, also pretty wild to just say "typical Swiss high school" without mentioning the selective system that steers people into and, overwhelmingly, away from the collèges.
    
    Foobar8568 - an hour ago
    
    Yeah, basically 20-25% are going to gymnase, and the rest are split between professional and "generalist" student.
    In Vaud, they merged the generalist class with the professional ones.
    Literacy is dog shit even in the so call native language. Until 11-12, what they cover at school is barely better than what kids learn at 8-9 in other countries. The change in middle school for the 12yo+ are huge, and 2-3 years are caught back within less than a year.
    Kids often struggle because of that huge difference. Needless to say, the bottom 75% are in even worse place, trying to study with kids who have no places at school.
    Marvelous system.
  - sakex - 7 hours ago
    
    Incredible to see my high school mentioned here
  - - 7 hours ago
    
    [deleted]
- GaryBluto - 7 hours ago
  
  > Switzerland is apparently a federation of federations.
  And three republics! Geneva, Ticino, and Neuchâte.
  - dkga - 2 hours ago
    
    I love going to Geneva and seeing the personification statues of the Republic of Geneva and of the Swiss Confederation standing side by side with the same height.
  - - an hour ago
    
    [deleted]
- jeffbee - 7 hours 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.
apnorton - 7 hours 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 - 4 hours 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.
nelox - 7 hours ago

Freedom
DANmode - 6 hours ago

What improvement?
- jeffbee - 5 hours ago
  
  You wouldn't end up contracting with some weird local nerds for critical systems?
  - kuerbel - 2 hours ago
    
    What local nerds? Usually you go to a so called "Systemhaus" for that. Like a contractor or I think you'd call it managed service provider. Some municipalities (or companies for that matter) get everything done by them, some have some admins but need some support in more complex matters. Completely professional and not some side gig, lol...
  - chrisandchris - 2 hours ago
    
    But you end up with 1 already large, foreign provider getting all your critical infra, at once?
    
    jeffbee - an hour ago
    
    Honestly yes. What's your threat model here? You don't want your systems held hostage by ransomware gangs. At local levels of government this is the main problem.
  - dewey - 5 hours ago
    
    It doesn’t say that each of the services they are using is some local small ISP, the whole point is to show they are also using large US companies.
    Also, it would probably be easier to get a real human on the phone or proper support from the local nerds compared to Google.
  - DANmode - 5 hours ago
    
    I’ll take rsync.net
    over OneDrive,
    all day long.
    As one example.
  - - 4 hours ago
    
    [deleted]

bblb - 2 hours 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 - 2 hours 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.