It was easy to ignore until now.

They never migrated to 365. The client (in the Netherlands) still self-hosts.

The point is that while it might be convenient to allow US companies to host your email, it's a security risk. There are plenty of non-US mail hosts such as ProtonMail that non-US organizations can use instead. Third-party companies are not the problem. Third-party companies subject to USA law are the problem.

To be clear... the client hired us to do the anti-spam part. They did the mail hosting themselves.

Microsoft is headquartered in the USA. If the USA invaded Greenland, which apparently it has contingency plans to do and the US government ordered Microsoft to disrupt services used by the Danish government... do you seriously think Microsoft would refuse?

Pete Hegseth said that the Pentagon has contingency plans to invade Greenland if necessary.

Let that sink in.

A NATO country, making plans to attack another NATO country.

The problem is always the training costs because people can't adapt to new software.

Of course they can. Otherwise nobody would ever use any software other than the software they started with, ever.

Changing from modern MS Word to modern LibreOffice Writer is probably no harder than changing from MS Word from 20 years ago to MS Word today, and people managed that.

I have direct experience with this. I ran a company from 1999 to 2018 and everyone got a Linux desktop... even the non-techies (sales/marketing types.) They adapted, because a browser is a browser, an email client is an email client, and a spreadsheet is a spreadsheet, at least for 99% of casual office users.

Calm down.

I said: "many US allies have come to see the US as a potentially-hostile nation-state."

This is objectively true. It's not my opinion.

The United States has threatened to take Greenland from Denmark without asking Denmark if it's OK. It has threatened to annex Canada. It has imposed ridiculous and unjustified tariffs on allies. These are facts, and are the reasons why many (former?) allies no longer trust the United States.

It has less to do with software or hardware quality, and more to do with Google's business model, which is to invade your privacy and surveil you.

At least Apple makes its money from hardware/software sales (and of course, fees for having your apps on the Apple store.)

I dislike them both. My favorite phone was my trusty Nokia N900, which ran Linux. But it stopped being maintained and eventually the hardware died.

If my next phone isn't an iPhone, it'll be a dumb phone or a Linux smartphone.

I host a small mail server, just for me.

However, for 19 years, I ran an email security service. We hosted about 100K mailboxes including outbound mail for about 10K of those. Our largest client probably hosted a million or more mailboxes (on its own hardware) and I don't recall them having deliverability problems.

I suspect small mail servers and huge mail servers will have fewer deliverability problems than medium-sized ones. Small ones because you fly under the radar and generally don't have abusive users; large ones because you're too big to block. It's those pesky middle-sized ones with between 100 and 10K users who are small enough to block but big enough to probably have abusive users that have the most problems, I'd think.

I agree. I hate Apple with a passion and have never purchased an Apple product, but Google's been rising exponentially on my hate-list, so my next phone might even be an iPhone.

If I can't effectively run open-source Android on the device of my choosing, I might as well just forget about Android and go with a company that's not surveilling me constantly to feed me ads.

I think this proves that Google's willing to take a hit to hardware sales if they can prevent people from escaping their surveillance capitalism business.

It shows where Google's profit really comes from.

Selecting software that is controlled by a potentially-hostile nation-state is simply poor security practice.

And since January 6, 2025, many US allies have come to see the US as a potentially-hostile nation-state.

The geopolitical situation is different this time around. Countries rightly see reliance on US-based services and US-based closed-source software as a national security risk. So the amount of inconvenience they're willing to tolerate will likely be much higher than before.

I have been self-hosting my email since 2000. No deliverability issues.

Sure, you have to abide by best practices such as setting up SPF, DKIM and DMARC, but that's generally a set-up-once-and-forget thing. I also enabled DNSSEC for good measure.

Anyone reading slashdot... time to prune your history. /s

I retired two years ago from software development, and I am so glad that I did. I hear from friends still in the industry that this AI bullshit is being pushed on them everywhere.