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.
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.
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.
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).
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.
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.
Infomaniak is quite well known in Switzerland, often one of the go-to alternatives when one doesn't want US cloud. Decently priced too for many things (not all of them though).
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.
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 :)
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]"
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.
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
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.
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.
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]
Ultimately the people are sovereign, but realistically the Kantons are. Which is why that often cited „lady denied citizenship“ is incomplete. The Kantonal court overturned the decision of the municipality and gave her citizenship.
It’s also why it took considerable more effort to force Appenzell to accept women’s suffrage.
Citizenship is federal (you're a citizen of the country, not the canton), but the procedure for getting citizenship varies and usually involves being in good standing with the local community. Especially in rural areas this sometimes needs court intervention if people are being too arbitrary.
is it though? I guess it depends on the definition you use. The line between federation and confederation is rather thin, and I believe those terms were historically even used as synonyms. Switzerland is at least called Confoederatio Helvetica, but you could probably argue it's a federation due to the centralized government. But then we also have to keep in mind that the sovereignty and the power of the country stays with the people and the cantons, and not the central government due to it's direct democracy.
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.
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.
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.
The flip side of this is that you can't possibly use a canton Zurich 1st grade arithmetic exercise book in a school in canton Aargau, despite 2+2 not depending on the canton (it would if the Swiss had any choice in the matter).
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.
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.
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.
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.
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...
It is up to the municipality to tell them where to host it. If you go there with no demands or restrictions they will take the easiest route and setting up a new mailserver is just really simple with exchange online. Additionally every license sold is a bit of MRR. So the incentive is quite high to sell m365. But it is up to the client and if the msp pushes too hard I'd go and look for another msp to be honest.
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.
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.
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)
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.
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.
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.
They have problems due to high humidity in the server room ;)
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.
I clicked on a few as well
Obviously this blue part here is the land
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…
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
Switzerland? Cows? I can’t help but be reminded of https://m.youtube.com/watch?v=ySxyPMZkrwU
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.
Wow, I knew it was true but this may really drives home just how much the netherlands is a microsoft shop.
Bert Hubert wrote about it at length since a few years already https://berthub.eu/articles/
The Swedish one was linked on the Belgian map: https://swedish-mail-dependency.netlify.app/
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...
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.
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).
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.
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.
Posts like these always give me a moment of pause to reflect just how expansive the global internet is.
I wonder how that one county ended up on infomaniak https://www.infomaniak.com/ Edit: (Looks like there are a few)
Infomaniak is Swiss, so it makes sense that the municipality decided to go with a local service.
Which county do you mean? Can you elaborate? Thanks.
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.
Infomaniak is quite well known in Switzerland, often one of the go-to alternatives when one doesn't want US cloud. Decently priced too for many things (not all of them though).
Warms my heart that it is not all divided between Google and Microsoft…
Be careful, the self-hosted may just be an out-of-date Exchange On-Premises.
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.
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 :)
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]"
I'd love a Thunderbird extension that shows where the mailboxes I correspond with are hosted.
Really: Zero for OVHcloud or Hetzner? I find it hard to believe!
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.
Via https://news.ycombinator.com/item?id=47827716
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
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.
[dead]
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?
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.
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
Ultimately the people are sovereign, but realistically the Kantons are. Which is why that often cited „lady denied citizenship“ is incomplete. The Kantonal court overturned the decision of the municipality and gave her citizenship.
It’s also why it took considerable more effort to force Appenzell to accept women’s suffrage.
Citizenship is federal (you're a citizen of the country, not the canton), but the procedure for getting citizenship varies and usually involves being in good standing with the local community. Especially in rural areas this sometimes needs court intervention if people are being too arbitrary.
It’s a federal republic like the US and many others. (Edit to add: « federal state » may be s better term.)
is it though? I guess it depends on the definition you use. The line between federation and confederation is rather thin, and I believe those terms were historically even used as synonyms. Switzerland is at least called Confoederatio Helvetica, but you could probably argue it's a federation due to the centralized government. But then we also have to keep in mind that the sovereignty and the power of the country stays with the people and the cantons, and not the central government due to it's direct democracy.
> is it though?
The federal goverment and the federal assembly seem to think it is, maybe because the federal laws say so starting with the federal constitution.
yeah, that's true, a lot of stuff refers to it as a federation
Switzerland is apparently a federation of federations. Local self-determination. Amazing place if you ask me would move back there in a heartbeat.
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.
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.
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.
The flip side of this is that you can't possibly use a canton Zurich 1st grade arithmetic exercise book in a school in canton Aargau, despite 2+2 not depending on the canton (it would if the Swiss had any choice in the matter).
Which are also interesting when you get certified in a trade school in one canton and then move into another one.
I remember when I used to live there, early 2000's, this was a problem, having to get an additional permit.
Incredible to see my high school mentioned here
> Switzerland is apparently a federation of federations.
And three republics! Geneva, Ticino, and Neuchâte.
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.
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.
> 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.
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.
Freedom
What improvement?
You wouldn't end up contracting with some weird local nerds for critical systems?
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...
The issue is that the choice of those companies is sometimes to host your stuff on MS365...
It is up to the municipality to tell them where to host it. If you go there with no demands or restrictions they will take the easiest route and setting up a new mailserver is just really simple with exchange online. Additionally every license sold is a bit of MRR. So the incentive is quite high to sell m365. But it is up to the client and if the msp pushes too hard I'd go and look for another msp to be honest.
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.
But you end up with 1 already large, foreign provider getting all your critical infra, at once?
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.
I’ll take rsync.net
over OneDrive,
all day long.
As one example.
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
Random red square I'd love for them to reduce their microsoft dependency, but not at the cost of whatever weloveyou.systems isThis 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)
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.
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.