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

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

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

Wow, I knew it was true but this may really drives home just how much the netherlands is a microsoft shop.

The Swedish one was linked on the Belgian map: https://swedish-mail-dependency.netlify.app/

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.

Be careful, the self-hosted may just be an out-of-date Exchange On-Premises.

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]"

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 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.

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.

Switzerland is apparently a federation of federations. Local self-determination. Amazing place if you ask me would move back there in a heartbeat.

> 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.

Freedom

What improvement?

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.