2,100 Swiss municipalities showing which provider handles their official email (mxmap.ch)
200 points by doener 12 hours ago
Related ongoing thread: Swiss authorities want to reduce dependency on Microsoft - https://news.ycombinator.com/item?id=47827383
FabCH an hour 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…
jmorenoamor 7 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 6 hours ago
They have problems due to high humidity in the server room ;)
user_of_the_wek 3 hours ago
Obviously this blue part here is the land
vvpan 5 hours ago
I clicked on a few as well
surmoi 4 hours 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...
dkga 7 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 7 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).
sam_lowry_ 8 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.
Huppie 3 hours ago
The Swedish one was linked on the Belgian map: https://swedish-mail-dependency.netlify.app/
amoshebb 3 hours 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 hours ago
Bert Hubert wrote about it at length since a few years already https://berthub.eu/articles/
zephyreon 12 hours ago
Posts like these always give me a moment of pause to reflect just how expansive the global internet is.
BobbyTables2 8 hours ago
Warms my heart that it is not all divided between Google and Microsoft…
chrisandchris 7 hours ago
Be careful, the self-hosted may just be an out-of-date Exchange On-Premises.
technion 6 hours 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 2 hours 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 hours 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]"
totetsu 10 hours ago
I wonder how that one county ended up on infomaniak https://www.infomaniak.com/ Edit: (Looks like there are a few)
reddalo 5 hours ago
Infomaniak is Swiss, so it makes sense that the municipality decided to go with a local service.
perotid 10 hours ago
Which county do you mean? Can you elaborate? Thanks.
veleek 9 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.
ale42 4 hours ago
hex-m 5 hours ago
I'd love a Thunderbird extension that shows where the mailboxes I correspond with are hosted.
throwaway2037 2 hours ago
Really: Zero for OVHcloud or Hetzner? I find it hard to believe!
dewey an hour 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.
doener 12 hours ago
derelicta 41 minutes 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
jeffbee 12 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 11 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.
kgwgk 3 hours ago
It’s a federal republic like the US and many others. (Edit to add: « federal state » may be s better term.)
pheggs 3 hours ago
vrganj 8 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
red_admiral 27 minutes ago
FabCH 2 hours ago
clbrmbr 12 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 12 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.
red_admiral 20 minutes ago
pjmlp 3 hours ago
sakex 12 hours ago
jeffbee 12 hours ago
GaryBluto 12 hours ago
> Switzerland is apparently a federation of federations.
And three republics! Geneva, Ticino, and Neuchâte.
dkga 7 hours ago
jeffbee 12 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 12 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 9 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 12 hours ago
Freedom
DANmode 10 hours ago
What improvement?
jeffbee 10 hours ago
You wouldn't end up contracting with some weird local nerds for critical systems?
kuerbel 7 hours ago
dewey 10 hours ago
chrisandchris 7 hours ago
DANmode 10 hours ago
bblb 7 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 6 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.
sixhobbits 2 hours 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
Microsoft hyperscaler hasle-ch.mail.protection.outlook.com
Microsoft hyperscaler spf.protection.outlook.com