Tuesday, September 1, 2026
Email, a blind spot in digital sovereignty
According to an opinion piece by Fabrice Tegon, project manager at BlueMind, published in Siècle Digital —Read the original article
Contracts, invoices, HR files, legal exchanges, confidential business information... Professional email holds a considerable portion of an organization's critical data. It's used by everyone, every day, and remains the primary communication tool in the workplace, alongside the calendar, structuring both daily tasks and strategic decisions. And yet, this essential channel remains largely absent from debates on digital sovereignty, as if it were a settled issue.
However, the figures tell a different story. According to an analysis by LLM Search Engine published in February 2026, Google and Microsoft control nearly two-thirds of email domains worldwide. In France, the media outlet Next recently revealed that 93% of startups in the French Tech Next40/120 2026 program entrust their emails to these same two American players, including companies supposedly driving French innovation.
An invisible, but crucial infrastructure
Users typically only see the interface of their email client—Outlook, Gmail, Thunderbird—without perceiving what's happening behind the scenes: the servers that manage sending, routing, calendar synchronization, directories, and access rights. Yet, it is at this level, largely invisible to the end user, that a crucial aspect of sovereignty is determined: who hosts the emails, who manages the infrastructure, who develops the solution used. When these layers escape the organization's control, the dependency becomes very real.
The trap of gradual confinement
This dependence isn't limited to a technical issue. It affects the organization's very ability to know who can access its communications and to ensure that its primary communication channel cannot be suspended or restricted by a third party. It's also an economic issue: once uses, collaborative tools, and business processes are stacked around a single suite, changing providers becomes lengthy, costly, and risky. An email system initially chosen for its simplicity can thus become, without the organization realizing it, the gateway to an entire ecosystem from which it becomes difficult to escape.
Regain control without turning everything upside down
Given this situation, the solution doesn't lie in a sudden, imposed change of tool; email is too deeply ingrained in work habits for that. The challenge is rather to regain control of the server layer, where messages are actually transmitted and stored, without necessarily disrupting the interface used daily by employees. This transition allows each organization to move forward at its own pace, maintaining some existing practices while gradually weaning itself off a dependency it doesn't control.
Digital sovereignty in messaging is therefore not a big bang, but a gradual regaining of control: knowing where your data is, and retaining the ability to evolve your information system, including, if necessary, changing providers.