MXmap — municipal email infrastructure maps

Interactive maps showing where Austrian municipalities host their email and how deeply their DNS is tied to US hyperscalers (Microsoft, Google, AWS) versus Austrian providers and self-hosted solutions.

View the maps

How it works

The data pipeline has two stages:

1. Resolve domains — Scrapes all ~2100 Austrian municipalities from the Österreichischer Städtebund and extends it with Wikidata. Applies manual overrides, scrapes municipal websites for email addresses, guesses domains from municipality names, and verifies candidates with MX lookups. Scores source agreement to pick the best domain. Outputs municipality_domains.json.

2. Classify providers — For each resolved domain, looks up all MX hosts, pattern-matches them, then runs 10 concurrent probes (SPF, DKIM, DMARC, Autodiscover, CNAME chain, SMTP banner, Tenant, ASN, TXT verification, SPF IP). Aggregates weighted evidence, computes confidence scores (0–100). Outputs data.json (full) and data.min.json (minified for the frontend).

flowchart TD
    subgraph resolve ["1 · Resolve domains"]
        städtebund[/"Österreichischer Städtebund"/] --> merge["Merge ~2100 municipalities"]
        wikidata[/"Wikidata SPARQL"/] --> merge
        overrides[/"overrides.json"/] --> per_muni
        merge --> per_muni["Per municipality"]
        per_muni --> scrape["Scrape website for<br/>email addresses"]
        per_muni --> guess["Guess domains<br/>from name"]
        scrape --> mx_verify["MX lookup to<br/>verify domains"]
        guess --> mx_verify
        mx_verify --> score["Score source<br/>agreement"]
    end

    score --> domains[("municipality_domains.json")]
    domains --> classify_in

    subgraph classify ["2 · Classify providers"]
        classify_in["Per unique domain"] --> mx_lookup["MX lookup<br/>(all hosts)"]
        mx_lookup --> mx_match["Pattern-match MX<br/>+ detect gateway"]
        mx_match --> concurrent["10 concurrent probes<br/>SPF · DKIM · DMARC<br/>Autodiscover · CNAME chain<br/>SMTP · Tenant · ASN<br/>TXT verification · SPF IP"]
        concurrent --> aggregate["Aggregate weighted<br/>evidence"]
        aggregate --> vote["Primary vote<br/>+ confidence scoring"]
    end

    vote --> data[("data.json + data.min.json")]
    data --> frontend["Leaflet map<br/>https://complexity-science-hub.github.io/mxmap-at/"]

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Classification system

see classifier.py for the full implementation details, but in summary, we use a weighted evidence system where each probe contributes signals of varying strength towards different provider classifications.

Quick start

uv sync

# Extract Austrian municipalities from Städtebund
uv run extract-austria-municipalities

# Stage 1: resolve municipality domains
uv run resolve-domains

# Stage 2: classify email providers
uv run classify-providers

# Optional: analyze results
uv run analyze

# Serve the map locally
python -m http.server

Development

uv sync --group dev

# Run tests (90% coverage threshold enforced)
uv run pytest --cov --cov-report=term-missing

# Lint & format
uv run ruff check src tests
uv run ruff format src tests

Related work

See the original project: https://github.com/davidhuser/mxmap

Licence

MIT