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Schleswig-Holstein completes migration to open source email
- hnspammers 1y agoI’m trying to read this but I keep getting popups and redirects. WTF?
- sebastian_z 1y agoHere is an archived version: https://archive.ph/H2IKF https://archive.ph/H2IKF
- deleted 1y ago[deleted]
- tcfhgj 1y agoworks fine with Firefox + uBlock Origin
- PeterStuer 1y agoNo problemon vanilla android chrome.
- vachina 1y agoLook at the username. Troll account.
- lousken 1y agowhere does open-xchange store its source code? github repos seem to be outdated
- colechristensen 1y agoLooks like a self-hosted gitlab https://gitlab.open-xchange.com/ https://gitlab.open-xchange.com/
- zenmac 1y agoWait so you need an account to view the source code?
- tcit 1y agoNot exactly (site:gitlab.open-xchange.com in a search engine gets you the links to access the projects directly), but the explore page is indeed restricted.
- cyberax 1y agoYou can thank AI bots for that.
- zenmac 1y agoWow didn't realize it has comes to this. I guess the AI bots are ignoring the robots.txt now days huh, so just removing the index seems enough to stop the AI scrappers?
- cyberax 1y agoYep. I have my own small gitweb server, and I was getting literally thousands requests per second from bots who try to crawl through all the links.
- nine_k 1y agoIn short: 30k users, 40k mailboxes, 100M emails and calendar entries migrated. The client is Thunderbird. The server / web side is handled by Open-Xchange, hosted by a local provider with the same name (AFAICT), which also offers commercial licensing for the otherwise-AGPL suite.
- yobbo 1y agoOpen-Xchange is most likely a more effective name for the combination Cyrus IMAP, postfix, etc.
- cycomanic 1y agoInstead of guessing it's an easy lookup. OpenXchange is an app suite that's been around for >20 years. It's not some random ad hoc combination of software. The email server underneath is dovecot btw.
- nine_k 1y agoThe mail server is Dovecot Pro, with some high-scalability improvements.
- Sauerlaender 1y agoThere are no high scalability improvements, it is a regular Dovecot Pro setup. 44.000 mailboxes is not really big from Dovecot Pro point of view, there are dozens of other service provider customers running six to eight digit mailbox numbers on it. Biggest European installation serves 40M mailboxes although these are consumer / SMB mailboxes which lower load provide and size compared to Schleswig-Holstein.
- yobbo 1y agoSo besides it being dovecot instead of cyrus, I am right? Btw, cyrus and postfix are far from random.
- 1y ago
- Aldipower 1y agoSchleswig-Holstein is even harder to pronounce then Massachusetts.
- shevy-java 1y agoHmmm. I am not sure. "Hol" is short. Stein is like a beer keg or stein beer. Schleswig is a bit awkward of a word. But Holstein should be easier, also there is the Holstein cow, black-white fur.
- baxtr 1y agoWhat about Connecticut though?
- tclancy 1y agoI just go with The Nutmeg State. Much clearer for everyone. (As a RI/ NH New England lifer, I, as is typical of us, think of Connecticut as New York's attic: a place you hide that which you don't need anymore but it would be gauche to throw out.)
- flohofwoe 1y agoArkansas takes the crown I think.
- ralfd 1y agoFor people never hearing an American say that: It is pronounced "Ar-kan-saw". It is written so strangely because it was named by the French and their stupid silent s.
- f1shy 1y agoIs it Ar-kan-saw, or Ar-kan-Sah?
- Polizeiposaune 1y agoThe website of the Arkansas Secretary of State says "Arkansaw" and includes this gem: "During the early days of statehood, Arkansas’ two U.S. Senators were divided on the spelling and pronunciation. One was always introduced as the senator from “ARkanSAW” and the other as the senator from “Ar-KANSAS”. " https://www.sos.arkansas.gov/education/arkansas-history/how-did-arkansas-get-its-name https://www.sos.arkansas.gov/education/arkansas-history/how-...
- markus_zhang 1y agoI vaguely remember this area from my history classes. Was it one of the two areas grabbed from Holland?
- MarcusE1W 1y agoNo
- jamesblonde 1y agoThere was a war over it in 1864, as the Prussians grew to become Germany taking the land from Denmark. https://en.wikipedia.org/wiki/Second_Schleswig_War https://en.wikipedia.org/wiki/Second_Schleswig_War
- throw-qqqqq 1y ago> Was it one of the two areas grabbed from Holland? Denmark, but being dutch vs danish is very commonly confused/conflated in the US :D
- markus_zhang 1y agoAh my bad! Thanks for the clarification. The name is pretty special so it brought forward some memory.
- throw-qqqqq 1y agoHaha sorry if I came across salty, I just wanted to joke around. It is true though. Can’t count how many times I’ve had this exchange “Oh danish huh? I love Amsterdam!” (the dutch capital) Europe is full of tiny countries and I absolutely can’t name all 50 US states or place even half on the map. No intention of shaming
- flohofwoe 1y agoYou're probably thinking of Denmark. TL;DR: Saxons => Danes ================> Prussia => Germany See also: https://en.wikipedia.org/wiki/Schleswig%E2%80%93Holstein_question https://en.wikipedia.org/wiki/Schleswig%E2%80%93Holstein_que...
- shevy-java 1y agoThis should be quicker. It is time to end the US hegemony in Europe.
- JumpCrisscross 1y ago> It is time to end the US hegemony in Europe That only happens if Europe militarizes. The security guarantee, not Microsoft Office, underwrites the dependence.
- timeon 1y agoOnly guarantees Europe currently have are nuclear missiles in France and maybe UK.
- JumpCrisscross 1y ago> Only guarantees Europe currently have are nuclear missiles in France and maybe UK The security guarantee is from Washington. Europe is de facto de-militarised when it comes to protecting its geopolitical position. Dumping America as a security partner would require materially reducing standards of living across the Continent, something Europeans are reluctant to do.
- hnarn 1y ago> Europe is de facto de-militarised What an absolutely ridiculous statement.
- avhception 1y agoGerman here. We need to get our shit together yesterday. But we're mostly just fumbling around.
- polski-g 1y agoHighly unlikely given your average age is 46. The time for draconian fertility policies was about 15 years ago. I think at this point most Europeans are just waiting for fiscal collapse.
- not_that_d 1y agoI wonder if they will dedicate resources to help the development of their open source tools?
- rowanG077 1y agoIn stark contrast to the dutch taxes division moving fully to office 365 this month.
- fanatic2pope 1y agoInteresting. Apparently they are planning to spend €2 million a year just to keep manual backups of critical data in case the US cuts off access. https://www.dutchnews.nl/2025/10/dutch-tax-office-moves-email-to-microsoft-despite-privacy-fears/ https://www.dutchnews.nl/2025/10/dutch-tax-office-moves-emai...
- Ringz 1y agoOk… that’s odd. Wouldn’t expect anything like this from the Dutch government, since they have a very progressive digital image in Europe.
- usrnm 1y agoFor the past 15 years being progressive meant moving everything to the (US-owned) cloud
- andrepd 1y agoImage ≠ reality :)
- vladms 1y agoNetherlands is generally very sensitive to price, so if the US cloud (plus the 2 millions for the backup) was cheaper than the alternatives they gladly took it. Also, I would expect Microsoft offered them a big discount...
- WhyNotHugo 1y agoEven the infrastructure for .nl domain registration moved to the US (AWS IIRC). There’s some Dutch governments organisations which are quite progressive, but others continue digging themselves deeps into MS/AWS.
- jamesblonde 1y ago
- vee-kay 1y agoIndian government announced its decision recently to migrate the IT software of all its government offices and PSUs (public sector units) from Microsoft to Zoho (an India-based IT company, whose affordable products are good alternatives to Microsoft and Google's products). Zoho has recently (re)launched Ulaa browser (Chromium fork, alternative to Chrome and Firefox) and Arattai (messenger app, alternative to Whatsapp and Singal), which are getting quite popular (Arattai and Ulaa topped Google Play Store recently in messenger and browser category). https://www.newsbytesapp.com/news/science/meet-ulaa-zoho-s-answer-to-google-chrome-what-it-offers/story https://www.newsbytesapp.com/news/science/meet-ulaa-zoho-s-a...
- Ringz 1y agoGood news but it would be much better if Zoho would be committed to open source its software.
- lewisjoe 1y agoJust curious: why is committing to open-source an expectation? Is it a moral standard you hold of businesses or is it because of the govt adoption?
- TuringTest 1y agoOpen-source has many technical advantages over closed-source, in addition to the moral ones (which are quite powerful themselves). Being able to inspect the software you use makes you able to trust house it works, and fix it at points where it's not working; those were the first motivators for creating the FLOSS movement. There's also the advantage that in the long term you don't depend on the company developing the software; if the company goes under, or simply stops supporting the software, you can hire a different batch of developers to carry on maintaining it. That's the reason why many big contracts require that the software vendor puts the source code under escrow. In reality, closing the source of software only benefits the seller; everybody else benefits from having it available. With FLOSS, you get that for free.
- vee-kay 1y ago
- tamimio 1y agoIt's a great move. I doubt it will add any substantial security measures, but the fact that more people -either individuals, organizations, or even governments- are disconnecting from the major big tech players is always a good sign and a healthy approach, especially when these few big companies are actively becoming hostile towards their users with different money-grab tactics and invasive technologies. Add to that AI craziness, and you are not a user anymore but a minion or a drone to such companies.
- kwar13 1y agoIt is really important to not build your national infrastructure around closed-source proprietary software that other nations control. I lived in Latin America for a year. It is shocking how much everything relies on WhatsApp. I got everything from visa appointments, airline tickets, to restaurant bookings in WhatsApp. Huge national security in my view.
- clvx 1y agoIt used to piss me off now I despise it. Another massive problem is if Meta has a fit with your organization, they can ban you from using WhatsApp for Business. All these Latam countries should and must pass regulations to avoid this kind of behavior. Free market all you want but if you captured market, it’s the nation’s responsibility to ensure their people can get the best service even if these companies are hating each other.
- kwar13 1y agoI'm a capitalist but yes when national security is in play "free market" in my book doesn't apply. You can't have health appointments, airline tickets, government services by default on WhatsApp. Most don't even bother with email and just default to WhatsApp. It was kind of the same but not as pervasive with Facebook Messenger in the Philippines.
- SllX 1y agoNone of those are national security issues though, they’re QoL issues. The problem isn’t WhatsApp owning the market, it’s governments making the choice to only make their services available through WhatsApp and providing no alternative of their own to receive services. Every single “WhatsApp is too dominant” story I’ve seen usually boils down to governments acting as enablers for the supposed issue themselves.
- kwar13 1y agoYou don't think WhatsApp for some reason stopping to work and airlines losing their default way to issue tickets is a national security issue? How about health care appointments with national ID and address on them being sent as PDFs and stored on Meta's servers? All of those are massive national security issues for me. It can grind the country to a halt for days on end. There's a reason South Korea has laws requiring all data on its citizens and geography to be stored in Korea. Even Google Maps doesn't quite work in Korea.
- kwar13 1y agoSo weird how HN ranking system works. Same article submitted 2 days ago barely got any traction: https://news.ycombinator.com/item?id=45538928 https://news.ycombinator.com/item?id=45538928
- Nathanael_M 1y agoI hope we get regular updates. Email deliverability is a frustration outside of the M365/Gmail ecosystems, but it’s not as bad as it’s sometimes made out to be, and I’m optimistic that increased rigour with the implementation of SPF/DMARC/DKIM will lead to better deliverability across the board. I’m curious if they see increases/decreases in spam, missed messages, successful phishing attempts, etc. Lastly, I’d love to know if they have had to change any security policies, and how are they handling identity management across the organization.
- stackskipton 1y agoAs former email admin, it’s not bad if someone is dedicated to it and you have your own block of IP. It’s frustrating for self hosting because lack of your IPs and most people don’t want spend free time on this busy work.
- dingdingdang 1y agoEven if you do ALL the techinical work you can still find yourself banned/ignored as I learned years ago the hard way.. even big providers outside MS/Goog duopoly finds themselves partially unable to deliver business emails at times.. fun times for a small shop (not).
- dminuoso 1y agoWe operate an MSP business for tens of thousands of customers and have our own ASN, but gmail outright refuses all our corporate email. Why? We do not know and gmail refuses to tell us. Their postmaster tools lie, are incomplete, display no data, display errors or contain no useful information. There is no human postmaster to contact, all our attempts have been ignored successfully. It’s downright silly but we have to send our corporate mail via a paid third party relay to be delivered to gmail. These gmail postmaster tools seems to exist to make antitrust cases difficult, not to enable other MSPs to deal with deliverability issues. At the same time gmail is emerging as the number one source of spam for our customers. If our spam fighting is too tight we falsely flag important mail as spam, and this is absolutely unacceptable to customers. As a consequence we have to relax our spam classification for gmail senders, which manifests itself in false negatives from the perspective of our customer. But to the customers this reflects on us, not on gmail. It’s just gmails best interests to make other MSPs miserable to operate. It drives our users to them.
- mfuzzey 1y agoI think we're going to be seeing more and more of this type of thing in Europe. Of course some administrations have already done it before, sometimes sucessfully, like the French gendarmerie and sometimes unsuccesfully like Munich that ended up reverting to Windows (mostly for political rather than technical reasons). But previously the motivations were difficult to understand for many, either being about saving money on licenses with dubious returns once retraining was considered or about software freedom arguments that are difficult to explain to non geeks. These days the US is increasingly seen as an untrustworthy partner / supplier in Europe and the digital digital sovereignty arguments are well understood, both by politicians and the general public.
- zenmac 1y agoThis is just the result of shifting from the uni-polar world to the multi-polar world. Guess this is just one phenomenon of the poles shifting. Hope this will result in gain for FOSS and the community.
- pjmlp 1y agoEven though I tend to bash a bit the whole evolution of Linux Desktop, that is more a complaint of where I wish things to be, than being a naysayer. FOSS stacks seem the only way with current geopolitics, but there is a big but. For proper freedom it would only work out if we got back the whole infrastructure from hardware, software, compiler toolchains, everything like in the cold war days, throughout the 8 and 16 bit home computers as well, however I doubt we would go back that far.
- LudwigNagasena 1y agoMost FOSS organisations, including the Linux Foundation, are headquartered in the US and are supported by American companies and, most likely, American three letter agencies.
- number6 1y agoYes, but they work differently. Due to their decentralised nature there is not one switch they can turn to shut off their services or programmes. US companies can be ordered to stop their services for certain organisations, individuals or states
- hadrien01 1y agoFrance is currently developing La Suite numérique[1], which includes email based on Open-Xchange. The German federal government also proposes Open-Xchange in their openDesk suite[2]. [1] https://lasuite.numerique.gouv.fr/ https://lasuite.numerique.gouv.fr/ [2] https://www.opendesk.eu/en/product#email https://www.opendesk.eu/en/product#email
- N19PEDL2 1y agoAnother missed opportunity to make a EU-wide project.
- LauraMedia 1y agoOn one hand, yes. There should be a good EU-wide easy to adopt system. On the other hand, the more people are involved, the slower progress is. And It makes sense to accelerate nationally and then combine EU-wide later on.
- Stranger43 1y agoWhy would we even want that, the whole point is to break the monoculture and single vendor dependency not to create an new mostly irrelevant one to be stuffed with has-been and rejects from the national levels the way most of EU's big prestige projects end up being run. One of the thing that sets EU apart from most federations is that it kind of enables a lot more regional independence in how things are actually implemented while still guaranteeing the rights of the individual citizens, this lead to a lot of dynamism at the local level despite the failings of the central level, and allow this kind of projects to succeed and create paths for others to follow at their own pace.
- rubzah 1y agoMaybe both? The EU could have a reference implementation, without mandating its use. The current EU model requires each member state to implement everything from scratch, obviously with subtle incompatibility that never gets fixed.
- palata 1y ago
- pjmlp 1y agoGreat and I wish they keep at it. However we have gotten multiple efforts in Germany that have been rolled back after a new administration takes over. A few years ago there were a few libraries in NRW using SuSE, and nowadays it is Windows on kiosk mode.
- figassis 1y agoIf more of this happens, especially in email, maybe Google, Microsoft and friends will be forced to democratize their email blacklisting. When countries start suing because email from government agencies is not getting to their citizens, these lists will hopefully get more decentralized.
- stego-tech 1y agoBeen saying it for years: the name of the (IT) game through 2030 and beyond won't be AI, so much as it'll be sovereignty. Everyone played the US' game and got relatively burned to varying degrees, so expect more countries utilize homegrown or FOSS products to retain sovereignty over their digital infrastructure going forward.
- johnebgd 1y agoPopulation decline and climate change impact may not provide enough surpluses in capital for specific areas to invest in reinventing various solutions unless AI makes the cost extremely low.
- Swenrekcah 1y agoYou raise a valid point, the resources we will have to put towards climate mitigation and dealing with extreme events will be a drain on productivity in other areas. However I think that will mostly be the case for “real” technology, I think capacity to produce software will be minimally affected even if there was no AI.
- stego-tech 1y agoEveryone likes to trot out “bUt ThE cApItAl” as an excuse to justify their current thing they’re really into, but the fact is that every single time a cause becomes important enough to fund, we always find the money somehow. This time will be no different. If your choices are sovereignty or subjugation, most organizations will fight for sovereignty when pressed beyond a breaking point or the math adds up in their favor. It might mean pulling funds from highly speculative fields or investments (y’know, like AI) in favor of more immediate benefits and gains, and everyone’s calculus is different, but to those for whom sovereignty is more important the capital will inevitably be found.
- JumpCrisscross 1y ago> every single time a cause becomes important enough to fund, we always find the money somehow We as in America, the richest country on the planet? Yes. We as in various countries that went bankrupt, collapsed or got invaded over the centuries because they broke their piggy bank over a boondoggle? No.
- surfingdino 1y agoProps! I hope they keep it and don't use it as a play to get a better deal from a commercial provider. I am jaded after seeing too many "digital transformation" projects running on a 3-5 year cycle of switching from Offie 365 to Google then back to Office 365.
- aetherspawn 1y agoI’m going to float a compromise that works pretty well and helped us get off Office with absolutely minimal effort… Exchange Online Plan 1 (the cheapest, no Office) Apple Mail (Active Sync), Pages, Numbers, Keynote (all free, perpetually, and mobile apps are available) Since these are packaged as store apps, we still get basic MDM and the ability to deploy/autoconfigure/autoupdate. Active Sync allows us to get email notifications in near real-time to mobile devices (which is otherwise difficult), as well as wipe emails remotely on lost devices if we need to. We get data sovereignty by using a Synology NAS, which has a Task to encrypt everything and upload it to Cloudflare R2 as a backup. We could really use any NAS solution, but so far Synology is hands free and can sync everyone’s emails from Exchange to the backup. Will ditch Exchange when someone finally starts an antitrust on Microsoft/Google email hosting.
- veganerfotze 1y ago[flagged]
- 9dev 1y agoWhat’s that to mean in particular?
- andybak 1y agoThe Schleswig-Holstein email migration is so complicated, only three men in Europe have ever understood it. One was Prince Albert, who is dead. The second was a German professor who became mad. I am the third and I have forgotten all about it.
- avhception 1y agoOh, sounds like Microsoft needs to move their German headquarter again.
- runxel 1y agoGood luck to them! On a nother note: still 1+ year(s) until we get a real email database (enabling gmail like thread view) in TB. [0] [0] https://blog.thunderbird.net/2025/10/video-conversation-view/ https://blog.thunderbird.net/2025/10/video-conversation-view...
- Piraty 1y agoIf they (and every public body doing the same move) now start donating 50% of their previous costs to the FOSS projects they, that would most notably put mozilla in a much better position to not have to bow to google money and go down the route they did lately.
- Stranger43 1y agoWhy do we want them to donate money rather then time/people.