- cross-posted to:
- Belgium@europe.pub
- cross-posted to:
- Belgium@europe.pub
cross-posted from: https://belgae.social/post/2546989
Indeed, all eggs are in one basket in Belgium. It is hard to find any exceptions whereby a government agency is independent and sovereign from Microsoft Corporation.
(edit) Can you fax them? Some agencies still have fax numbers. Not enough of them… it’s a shame to see fax die when it is the only somewhat universal electronic way to send a message without exposure to surveillance advertisers and their walled-garden barriers. This question really boils down to: are the fax numbers going to an inhouse decoder, or are they just 3rd party cloud services that repackage the faxes as an email?
update
Given details in this comment:
https://belgae.social/post/2547022/5282959
it’s perhaps inaccurate to say Belgium is 100% reliant on Microsoft for email. Parliament (lachambre.be) uses an email firewall which hides their email provider. The DNS TXT record shows an SPF entry with outlook·com, among others.
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Genuine question… If a government or business is using Microsoft for email, how do they not go 100%? Is the thought that they have multiple email providers?
The gov is not a single entity. There is parliament, a revenue service, an anti-competition authority, police, telecom regulator, etc. Probably hundreds of agencies. If each agency decides for itself who to outsource email to, that is one way to not be 100% reliant on MS.
For a single entity, it is possible to have an MX record that points to multiple different hosts. I have never seen a Belgian gov agency list multiple choices. It’s almost always
*protection.outlook.com. I asked around to try to get to the bottom of that and was told that Belgium decided to use Microsoft across the board for all agencies.I’ve just discovered that Parliament exceptionally uses an email firewall. But we can see in the SPF records that outlook is used for sending. So it is likely that outlook is also used behind the email firewall on email they receive. There is not enough transparency though. There are other services in the outbound SPF record. So IIUC, Parliament would have been able to /send/ email during Microsoft’s outtage. But we can only guess. Those other services on the
v=spf1line just suggest that they authorize outbound messages with alternate providers, not that their users are actually given that option or that email will travel that way.I suppose 100% may not be accurate considering this observation with Parliament. I will update the title.
Really, genuinely, thank you for the detailed response! It brings another question to mind though. In simplistic terms, the suggestion seems to be that different governmental groups should just use different email providers? If that’s the case, who decides what provider each group uses? It’s there a body that would coordinate this kind of diversity within corporate or governmental groups? I guess really, the question is that is it is agreed that M$ provides the “best” product, what incentive would there be to use anything else? Please note best in quotes as it’s a subjective measure. Thanks!
This whole thing had woke me to the fact that apparently no one runs their own Exchange server in 2026.
I thought it was generally the case that orgs would run their own Exchange server, but that those local servers were still dependent on a Microsoft host nontheless. I’ve not followed it too close though.
I had the opposite idea. OTOH, I’ve never run an exchange server and haven’t been in the MS ecosystem as an admin for 7-years.
For me it only matters if I can work out whether MS is in the loop. When an MX lookup yields simply “brucity-be.mail.protection.outlook.com”, that is a hostname that is specific to the city. It suggests that the city runs their own MS Exchange server. That is a typical config for most orgs. MS of course still wants to handle the traffic so they can see it and collect data for their advertising business under the guise/pretext of spam filtering. This is why I believe what I was told – that the Exchange server still connects to a host in Microsoft’s data center.
If there is a source that covers this concretely, I would be interested because when I decide whether to send an email to some person or agency, whether MS is a MitM makes a critical difference in that decision. I see “outlook.com” in the domain name and avoid it.
lol relying on corpos is stupid shit.
there’s a scale where contracting to an external provider makes sense, and ‘city government’ like Belgium is so far above it. with a million people you can run your own provider with redundancies and junk.
The way our government’s ICT works is anyway relying on corporation providing services. Either you have them spin custom servers and shit or they provide you with MS services. Our government needs to govern, not support email servers.
your government usnt just a mayor or a city council or a vuncha anonymous dudes in cool masks or whatever. there’s people who put out fires and abuse the homeless and clean the streets and trim the trees at least at city buildings and on public streets and catch the stray animals and stuff.
and those organizations all have people who do things like mop the floors and fix the computers. an email server is something I can run in my spare time. your government can afford an it services department if its even a mid-size city.
Yeah you run you home lab on your spare time. On the size of the government one cannot afford any loose end that would typically occur with non specialists. Hence why most of my contry’s ICT is subcontracted to companies like the Smalls or sometimes to my employer. Nothing is simple with such large scales and when stakes are so high. Unlike your basement.
and there it is. you’re simping for your boss.
don’t you want a cushy job with the city government of Belgium doing exactly what you do now but with less corpo shit and less boss stealing your wages?
Uh? Am I? Because I point out that a government ‘s job is to govern?? And that there are governement partnerships whose role is to support them where they need to?? Have you looked up the smalls? You are just ignorant and vindictive for no reason here.
private corporations are bad shitty insecure and overpriced. they do worse work than they could with any other motivation scheme, and skim money at every step because that’s literally the point of them. why on earth would anyone who’s not just a corrupt asshole do things that way?
