[HN Gopher] Schleswig-Holstein completes migration to open sourc...
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Schleswig-Holstein completes migration to open source email
Author : sebastian_z
Score : 295 points
Date : 2025-10-12 14:53 UTC (8 hours ago)
(HTM) web link (news.itsfoss.com)
(TXT) w3m dump (news.itsfoss.com)
| hnspammers wrote:
| I'm trying to read this but I keep getting popups and redirects.
| WTF?
| sebastian_z wrote:
| Here is an archived version: https://archive.ph/H2IKF
| tcfhgj wrote:
| works fine with Firefox + uBlock Origin
| PeterStuer wrote:
| No problemon vanilla android chrome.
| vachina wrote:
| Look at the username. Troll account.
| lousken wrote:
| where does open-xchange store its source code? github repos seem
| to be outdated
| colechristensen wrote:
| Looks like a self-hosted gitlab
|
| https://gitlab.open-xchange.com/
| zenmac wrote:
| Wait so you need an account to view the source code?
| tcit wrote:
| Not 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 wrote:
| You can thank AI bots for that.
| nine_k wrote:
| In 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 wrote:
| Open-Xchange is most likely a more effective name for the
| combination Cyrus IMAP, postfix, etc.
| cycomanic wrote:
| Instead 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.
| Aldipower wrote:
| Schleswig-Holstein is even harder to pronounce then
| Massachusetts.
| shevy-java wrote:
| Hmmm. 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 wrote:
| What about Connecticut though?
| flohofwoe wrote:
| Arkansas takes the crown I think.
| ralfd wrote:
| For 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 wrote:
| Is it Ar-kan-saw, or Ar-kan-Sah?
| tclancy wrote:
| I 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.)
| qwertfisch wrote:
| If you can read the phonetic alphabet, the pronunciation is
| given on both the German and English Wikipedia page for
| Schleswig-Holstein. But the English page gives an English
| variant, not the original (and correct) German pronunciation.
| jschoe wrote:
| It's quite easy for English speakers.
|
| Sh-less-wig Hole-stein or Shlayz-wig Hole-stein.
| Aldipower wrote:
| And this my friend is both not correct. :-) I am from
| Schleswig-Holstein btw..
| GLdRH wrote:
| I don't know why you're getting downvoted
| Aldipower wrote:
| Because they tried to pronounce Schleswig-Holstein in a
| correct way and now their tongue hurts really bad. :-D
| timeon wrote:
| > Massachusetts
|
| If English had proper 'c' (not just fake 'k' or 's') you could
| simplify it at least to: 'Massacusec'.
|
| Similarly 'Schleswig' can be compressed to 'Sleswig'.
| markus_zhang wrote:
| I vaguely remember this area from my history classes. Was it one
| of the two areas grabbed from Holland?
| MarcusE1W wrote:
| No
| jamesblonde wrote:
| There 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
| throw-qqqqq wrote:
| > 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 wrote:
| Ah my bad! Thanks for the clarification. The name is pretty
| special so it brought forward some memory.
| throw-qqqqq wrote:
| Haha 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 wrote:
| You're probably thinking of Denmark. TL;DR:
| Saxons => Danes ================> Prussia => Germany
|
| See also:
| https://en.wikipedia.org/wiki/Schleswig%E2%80%93Holstein_que...
| Podrod wrote:
| Not quite.
|
| https://en.wikipedia.org/wiki/Schleswig%E2%80%93Holstein_que...
| shevy-java wrote:
| This should be quicker. It is time to end the US hegemony in
| Europe.
| JumpCrisscross wrote:
| > _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 wrote:
| Only guarantees Europe currently have are nuclear missiles in
| France and maybe UK.
| JumpCrisscross wrote:
| > _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.
| avhception wrote:
| German here. We need to get our shit together yesterday. But
| we're mostly just fumbling around.
| not_that_d wrote:
| I wonder if they will dedicate resources to help the development
| of their open source tools?
| rowanG077 wrote:
| In stark contrast to the dutch taxes division moving fully to
| office 365 this month.
| fanatic2pope wrote:
| Interesting. Apparently they are planning to spend EUR2 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-emai...
| Ringz wrote:
| Ok... that's odd. Wouldn't expect anything like this from the
| Dutch government, since they have a very progressive digital
| image in Europe.
| usrnm wrote:
| For the past 15 years being progressive meant moving
| everything to the (US-owned) cloud
| andrepd wrote:
| Image [?] reality :)
| vladms wrote:
| Netherlands 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...
| jamesblonde wrote:
| The Swedish tax authorities went all in on Azure. Insane. And
| screw solidarity with the Danes. We rent our digital infra, and
| now the Don extractive rents. He also threatens us if we want
| to have our own laws or, god forbid, support our own digital
| infra.
| vee-kay wrote:
| Indian 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-a...
| Ringz wrote:
| Good news but it would be much better if Zoho would be
| committed to open source its software.
| lewisjoe wrote:
| Just 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 wrote:
| Open-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 wrote:
| Corporates (even governmental companies/ departments) don't
| usually go for Open-Source since the code may not be
| maintained and there may not be any support.
|
| This is why FOSS systems like Linux and OpenOffice are still
| not mainstream in the corporate world (though Linux
| rightfully dominates in the backend server market), whereas
| Microsoft rules the corporate world with its expensive
| software (Windows and MS-Office).
| throw_await wrote:
| Try getting support from google
| ivan_gammel wrote:
| Plenty of server-side FOSS is mainstream. Maintainability
| of the code is not _the_ problem -- there exist commercial
| support options. On desktop FOSS often has inferior
| usability for non-tech users due to different incentives
| for product development. If you ask anyone in the legal or
| accounting departments of a corporation, they will demand
| Microsoft (not even Google) not because it's more expensive
| or has terms and conditions, but because they just can't
| feel themselves productive when using alternatives.
| LibreOffice is not bad, but it isn't great too.
| nextos wrote:
| Zoho is interesting in the sense that it is one of the few
| email providers I know of that lets you use a custom domain
| with one of their free plans.
|
| Very startup friendly. Also free POP/IMAP, so you are not
| locked in.
| vee-kay wrote:
| Zoho's plans are very affordable and friendly for startups.
|
| That affordability, quality and service is why Indian
| government is migrating its IT dependencies from Microsoft to
| Zoho.
| iosjunkie wrote:
| That used to be the case. You can still get free email
| hosting, but POP/IMAP needs a paid plan.
| navigate8310 wrote:
| Being a closed-source stack, their CVE disclosures [0] paints
| quite a sorry picture, unless, of course, they've built such
| mind-blowing security that it makes Microsoft, Oracle,
| Salesforce and Google combined look like amateurs.
|
| [0] https://www.cvedetails.com/vendor/14145/
| tamimio wrote:
| It'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 wrote:
| It 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 wrote:
| It 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 wrote:
| I'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 wrote:
| None 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.
| f1shy wrote:
| Yes. Absolutf*kingeverything is whatsup. That was annoying at
| the beginning.
|
| But: people there are practical and flexible. It would take
| days to a month to migrate, what is impossible in first world,
| just take Germany as an example.
|
| Also whatsapp is e2e encrypted, so not so bad. In Germany many
| things go over FAX or mail, totally unencrypted...
| croemer wrote:
| What is "firat world"?
| leipert wrote:
| Probably a typo ,,a" is next to ,,s"
| f1shy wrote:
| First. Corrected.
| kwar13 wrote:
| So weird how HN ranking system works. Same article submitted 2
| days ago barely got any traction:
|
| https://news.ycombinator.com/item?id=45538928
| Nathanael_M wrote:
| I 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 wrote:
| As 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 wrote:
| Even 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 wrote:
| We 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.
| gucci-on-fleek wrote:
| > 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 [...] I'm curious if they see
| increases/decreases in spam, missed messages, successful
| phishing attempts, etc.
|
| It's probably not much of an issue in this specific case. If
| someone doesn't get your email, that's your (the sender's)
| problem; but if someone doesn't get the government's email,
| then that's their (the recipient's) problem.
| c0balt wrote:
| To add to this, most emails are likely within the
| organization and/or between public institution.
|
| E-Mail was (last time I checked) not an approved medium for
| delivery of important documents as it does not (per design)
| have a mandatory receipt of the message being delivered. So a
| citizens does not need to worry a lot about this for
| important documents/mail.
|
| (Fax was so popular for public institutions in Germany
| because it satisfied this standard. It meant it usually was
| the lowest barrier option and you could rely on it for all
| (un)important documents)
| mfuzzey wrote:
| I 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 wrote:
| This 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 wrote:
| Even 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.
| hadrien01 wrote:
| France is currently developing La Suite numerique[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/ [2]
| https://www.opendesk.eu/en/product#email
| pjmlp wrote:
| Great 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 wrote:
| If 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 wrote:
| Been 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 wrote:
| Population 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 wrote:
| You 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 wrote:
| Everyone 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 wrote:
| > _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.
| MaxPock wrote:
| Of course you don't want to wake up one day and you can't
| access your mails because the US government doesn't like you. .
| Huawei had to develop an in-house solution after SAP cut them
| off.
| pessimizer wrote:
| The rest of the world has had forever to do sovereignty, and
| the blessing of a FOSS ecosystem (that doesn't exist in fully
| 85% of alternate universes) which would make it absurdly easy.
| Europe has the same bosses as everybody else, and they pretty
| much pilot authoritarian overreach there before they try it in
| the US against a stronger constitution and _clear_ Bill of
| Rights.
|
| The reason Europe isn't independent is because they _like_ that
| the US goes through their citizens ' data, and are happy for
| Microsoft (or whoever, I guess Palantir, Crowdstrike, and 18
| Israeli military startups) to package it up and send it to
| them. They love to not spend on tech and talk the future, just
| like they love to not spend on the military and talk tough.
|
| The reason they talk about US tech domination is to whip up a
| "nationalism" which is, of course, an EU _federalism_ and a
| usurpation of the self-determination of the various nations of
| Europe for the sake of the deep pockets that dogwalk the EU to
| where they want it to be. It also keeps France and Germany in
| the center of Europe forever. They don 't talk about "tech
| independence" because they mean anything by it.
|
| They've had 30 years to grab FOSS and run with it, and infinite
| cash. Instead, you got cookie banners, social media monitoring,
| and in a minute, chat control.
|
| The only people who are seriously working on digital
| sovereignty are the Chinese.
|
| edit: I'd like to add that I'm all for Europe going all-in on
| FOSS, or (less-so) even coming up with a full proprietary
| ecosystem completely independent of US tech overlords. This
| would be nothing but a benefit to me. It will just never, ever
| happen. Any European who would be expected to pay for it is
| already heavily invested with US tech overlords, because
| billionaires aren't nationalists, they're narcissists.
| surfingdino wrote:
| Props! 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 wrote:
| I'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.
| andybak wrote:
| The 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 wrote:
| Oh, sounds like Microsoft needs to move their German headquarter
| again.
| runxel wrote:
| Good 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...
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