2,100 Swiss municipalities showing which provider handles their official email(mxmap.ch)
98 pointsby doener6 hours ago10 comments
  • bblba minute 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)

  • jmorenoamor4 minutes 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.

  • dkga34 minutes 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_typist10 minutes 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).
  • BobbyTables2an hour ago
    Warms my heart that it is not all divided between Google and Microsoft…
    • chrisandchris27 minutes ago
      Be careful, the self-hosted may just be an out-of-date Exchange On-Premises.
  • zephyreon5 hours ago
    Posts like these always give me a moment of pause to reflect just how expansive the global internet is.
  • sam_lowry_an hour 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.

  • totetsu4 hours ago
    I wonder how that one county ended up on infomaniak https://www.infomaniak.com/ Edit: (Looks like there are a few)
    • perotid3 hours ago
      Which county do you mean? Can you elaborate? Thanks.
      • veleek2 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.

  • maryjeiel3 hours ago
    [dead]
  • jeffbee6 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?
    • rzwitserloot4 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.

    • clbrmbr5 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.
      • clbrmbr5 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.
        • sakex5 hours ago
          Incredible to see my high school mentioned here
        • jeffbee5 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.
        • 5 hours ago
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      • GaryBluto5 hours ago
        > Switzerland is apparently a federation of federations.

        And three republics! Geneva, Ticino, and Neuchâte.

        • dkga35 minutes 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.
      • jeffbee5 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.
    • apnorton5 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.

      • toast02 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.

    • nelox6 hours ago
      Freedom
    • DANmode4 hours ago
      What improvement?
      • jeffbee3 hours ago
        You wouldn't end up contracting with some weird local nerds for critical systems?
        • kuerbel23 minutes 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...
        • dewey3 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.

        • 3 hours ago
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        • DANmode3 hours ago
          I’ll take rsync.net

          over OneDrive,

          all day long.

          As one example.