What's the state of digital sovereignty for our academic landscape?

Inspired by a similar post looking at digital sovereignty of municipalities, I explored what messaging infrastructure universities rely on. Sadly, many have switched to hyper scalars but few large universities keep running their own email infrastructure. Germany, Austria, France does not look too bad and lead by example.

[Note that the assessment is based on a simple MX records comparison against a list of known scalars, I don't yet check SPF records or guesstimate the SMTP software/version, this may be done in a future version.]

Check out the interactive map: https://nebelwelt.net/gannimo/unimx/

@gannimo UNIL is definitely also infected by the MS virus... Not sure why their MX records don't point to MS. Perhaps they still self-host the MS Exchange server?

Can you do a EHLO on the SMTP to see what the software is?

@ligasser most servers stopped advertising the software name, would have to start parsing SPF and potentially connect to IMAP as well

@gannimo I know they dropped the version numbers, but also the software name? I'm getting old...

% telnet mail.epfl.ch 25
Trying 128.178.222.71...
Connected to mail.epfl.ch.
Escape character is '^]'.
220 mail.epfl.ch AngelmatoPhylax SMTP proxy

No idea where they got the AngelmatoPhylax from...

@ligasser @gannimo Just saw this yesterday https://mxmap.ch/
A cool map of which mail systems are used by swiss communes. Not every part is infected it seems.
MXmap — Email Sovereignty of Swiss Municipalities

Interactive map showing where Swiss municipalities host their official email. DNS analysis of all ~2,100 municipalities, color-coded by provider.

MXmap
@ligasser @gannimo and yes, if you check the SPF record of UNIL you get the truth
"unil.ch descriptive text "v=spf1 [...] include:spf.protection.outlook.com..."

@aspert @gannimo I just learnt that my commune uses

azinformatique.ch

never heard of them...