2,100 Swiss municipalities showing which provider handles their official email
mxmap.ch
Related ongoing thread: Swiss authorities want to reduce dependency on Microsoft - https://news.ycombinator.com/item?id=47827383
mxmap.ch
Yeah, have a nice day everyone.
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…
I remember seing the Swedish map as well but can't find it now.
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.
Petit-Val (BE) and Evolène (VS) are two.
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.
Edit: there are (Infomaniak...), it was just Firefox json search who failed me :)
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.
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.
I remember when I used to live there, early 2000's, this was a problem, having to get an additional permit.
And three republics! Geneva, Ticino, and Neuchâte.
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.
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.
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.
[0] https://en.wikipedia.org/wiki/Women%27s_suffrage_in_Switzerl... [1] https://www.bbc.com/news/newsbeat-38595807
It’s also why it took considerable more effort to force Appenzell to accept women’s suffrage.
The federal goverment and the federal assembly seem to think it is, maybe because the federal laws say so starting with the federal constitution.
Also, it would probably be easier to get a real human on the phone or proper support from the local nerds compared to Google.
over OneDrive,
all day long.
As one example.
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
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)
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.
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.