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 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.
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.
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.
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.
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)
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.
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.
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.
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.
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[ 2.6 ms ] story [ 39.1 ms ] threadI 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.
Yeah, have a nice day everyone.
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)
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.
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 isWe 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…
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.