Swiss map shows which providers handle official municipal email — and who might be able to access it

What the map is and how it was assembled

A new interactive map catalogs roughly 2,100 Swiss municipalities and displays which provider handles their official email, grouped by jurisdiction. It has been reported that the dataset was compiled from public DNS records and other public network signals — nothing secret, just the plumbing of the internet laid out in plain sight. The visual makes it easy to see, at a glance, which municipalities route mail through which vendors.

The nuts and bolts

Each municipality’s official domain was checked against 11 signals, including DNS records, SMTP banners, ASN lookups and a public Microsoft API endpoint. Results are classified by provider type and presented with a confidence score, so a reader can see not just the label but how sure the scanner was. A clear disclaimer accompanies the project: DNS records indicate mail routing and authorized senders, not necessarily where mailbox contents are stored.

Why this matters

This isn’t just nerdy cartography. Digital sovereignty is on the line. US-based providers are subject to the CLOUD Act, which allows US authorities to request stored data regardless of physical location — and the map makes that provider landscape visible. Who runs a town’s email isn’t trivia; it touches privacy, public trust and compliance with broader European data-protection debates such as GDPR. Sounds dry? Try explaining that to someone whose municipal notifications pass through a jurisdiction they didn’t choose.

Open data and next steps

The code and the data are published on GitHub, and the project invites corrections — if you spot an error, submit an issue. No cloak-and-dagger here: it’s an open-source snapshot of how Swiss municipalities route official mail. Questions remain, and that’s the point — now we can at least ask them out loud.

Sources: mxmap.ch, Hacker News