Author: Kelsey Cummings

DKIM Signing Outbound Email

We began signing outbound mail flows for sonic.net and list.sonic.net several weeks ago and have started to sign all customer owned domains this morning. This should be seamless for most customers, however, in some cases you may receive special instructions from us in order to enable it for your domains. Having aligned DKIM and SPF has become increasingly important to ensure reliable email delivery, especially into large providers like Gmail, Yahoo and Microsoft. We have chosen not to add DMARC records to customer domains at this time.

Please note, that if you use a third-party service provider such as Mailchimp, Constant Contact, Salesforce or Shopify to send email from either your sonic.net or hosted domain you will most likely need to take action to ensure this email will continue to be delivered as expected. Importantly, you will not be able to send mail through a third-party service from a “@sonic.net” address. (These messages can, of course, have a reply-to to your “@sonic.net” address.) If you do use a third-party service, you will need to work with their customer service to ensure your mail flows will not be affected.

Please direct any questions or comments to https://forums.sonic.net

Forums software upgraded

Tonight on October 23rd, 2023, we installed updates to our forums software on https://forums.sonic.net/. In addition to the forum and backend software upgrades, our forum style (appearance) also got minor updates.

The default style for all forum accounts was set to the new theme as part of the upgrade. If you wish to change back to the forum default, go to the user control panel and change your board style to prosilver at https://forums.sonic.net/ucp.php?i=174.

 

Santa Rosa Data Center and Colo UPS Replacement

We are scheduled and on track to replace one of the UPSes that supplies power to our Santa Rosa Data Center and Colo facility at 9:00 AM on 5/26. The UPS has reached its end of life and is being replaced with a new highly efficient modular UPS. The cut over from the old UPS to the new UPS is fully scripted and coordinated with our vendors and no interruption of power services to the facility should occur. This process will be repeated to replace the other end of life UPS with a similar replacement UPS in the coming weeks.

Update: The first UPS replacement went off smoothly without a hitch. Replacement of the second UPS will begin on June 6th and should be completed on June 7th.
Update: The second UPS replacement has been delayed and load testing and commissioning will begin on June 8th.

-Sonic System Operations and Facilities

SPF record added to domains with Sonic DNS & Email hosting

Today on August 22, 2022, we added a default SPF (Sender Policy Framework) record to every customer domain name that has Sonic DNS hosting and email hosted with Sonic.

On August 15th, we emailed everyone who would be impacted by this change. The email subject was “Important information about your Sonic domain email hosting” and included a list of domain names that would be updated.

If you did not receive the email or do not have domain email and DNS hosting with Sonic, this notification does not apply to you.

If you received the above notification email and did not opt out or add an SPF record before today, the following SPF record was added to your domain:

"v=spf1 include:mail.sonic.net ~all"

For more information, please see our help document SPF and Sonic. To learn more about SPF, see Sender Policy Framework on Wikipedia.

We made this change to fight spam & phishing and to help ensure reliable email delivery for our domain email customers. SPF tells other email providers that Sonic is authorized to send email on behalf of these hosted domain names.

T-Mobile Filtering SMS Messages from Support

It’s come to our attention that T-Mobile is filtering our SMS messages used to chat with support, send notifications, OTP and password recovery.  We’re working with our upstream SMS provider and hope to have this resolved soon.

Update: We’ve migrated OTP and password recovery to a different number to work around the block for these services.

-Sonic Operations

New Recursive DNS Server IPs

208.201.224.11 and 208.201.224.33, carved out of one of our first IP allocations, have been Sonic’s official recursive DNS servers for as long as 20 years.  Unfortunately, for various reasons, we need must deprecate this legacy IP assignment and have added 50.0.1.1 and 50.0.2.2 to our recursive DNS clusters to take their place.  If you have statically configured DNS servers feel free to update them at any time.  We will migrate server assigned DNS to the new IPs at our convenience.  The legacy IPs will continue to work indefinitely.   – System Operations

Cisco VPN Services Shutdown 8/31

We’re shutting down our legacy Cisco VPN services at the end of the August, 2020.  It has been replaced with our OpenVPN server which is also free for all Sonic customers to use.  OpenVPN is a modern VPN service with widespread support available in all current operating systems, mobile platforms and even many routers and firewalls.

To use the new VPN, simply log into https://ovpn.sonic.net using your Sonic username and password then download and install the appropriate client.  Once complete you can either download and import the connection profile manually or log in directly to https://ovpn.sonic.net

The few users still connecting to the old service have been notified directly.

-Kelsey

Comcast DNSSEC issues

We’re investigating DNSSEC failures for the comcast.net and comcast.com domains which are causing delays and errors for inbound and outbound mail due to inability to resolve Comcast domain names. We have mitigation in place now to prevent issues.

Any messages that may have failed to deliver should be re-sent and will now succeed.

– System Operations

Inbound Mail Delays

We’re experiencing significantly above average inbound email flows at this time which has exceeded our spam filtering servers capacity.  These messages are queued locally pending available resources which may add a couple of minutes delay where delivery usually takes less than a second.  This is also resulting in a brief delay while sending outbound messages.  We’re bringing up additional resources now and expect to have the issue resolved soon.

Update: Additional resources have been deployed and this is no longer in issue.

-System Operations

Member Tools Maintenance

Tonight at 11:59 PM the Sonic Member Tools (https://members.sonic.net/) will be unavailable for a brief period of time while software upgrades are installed.

The maintenance window is 1 hour, but we expect no more than 20 minutes of down time.  During this time, functions such as bill pay, Graymail management, and voice tools will be unavailable.

Update: Maintenance completed at 12:15 AM with no down time.

-System Operations