- 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.
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.