Tonight, at 12:00AM, we will migrate “mail.sonic.net” to a new cluster. Â Users may be unable to send mail through mail.sonic.net during the migration which is expected to take 10-15 minutes to complete. Â There’s no new exciting features to tout, just a fresh OS and faster modern hardware.
In other news, our MX server cluster now supports SSL encryption for inbound connections.  This allows the session between the connecting server and our’s to be fully encrypted preventing messages from being available “on the wire” in clear text.  Our outbound servers have supported this kind of encryption when sending mail to destinations that support it for more than a decade.  At this time it looks like approximately 15-20% of inbound email is encrypted in transit.
-Kelsey
Update: Â Wed Nov 13 00:48:37 PST 2013, the upgrades are finished and went over as planned.
Great. Now when will be able to check our sonic mail on mobile devices?
That’s something we can really get excited about!
Charles, any modern smart phone should have no trouble accessing your sonic.net email with it’s built in or add-on mail client.
As of about 5:30 AM today, I can no longer send emails. I receive a message: Error reading from network, cause: connection aborted due to timeout or other failure (10053).
Well, I’m not sure what changed. In the past, when I’ve called Sonic Tech Support and asked how do I set up the mail client on my phone, I’ve been told, “We do not support mobile mail.” Full stop. No workarounds, no can do.
I’ll call in again and see what they say this time.
Jack, please give support a call if you are still having trouble with trouble sending mail.
Heads-up – this change appears to have triggered the following warning from Thunderbird: “This site attempts to identify itself with invalid information.[View] Wrong Site. Certificate belongs to a different site, which could indicate an identity theft.”. If someone could comment on whether this change was expected I’d appreciate it. Thanks!
A.C.
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AC – that should not be happening but could be caused by a couple of things. My first guess is that your outbound mail server name isn’t set to “mail.sonic.net” and so Thunderbird throws the certificate validation error (like it should!) Go to Tools -> Account Settings -> Outgoing Server then click on “edit” on the appropriate account. It should be configured as follows:
Server Name: mail.sonic.net
Port: 587
User Name: your_username
Authentication method: Normal password
Connection Security: STARTTLS
It would appear my outgoing mail settings were identical to what you specified aside from one minor change – I had specified smtp.sonic.net instead of mail.sonic.net. I was able to send a message without complaint after changing it to the correct name. I’ve been using this exact configuration of Thunderbird since 2003 (!) so this is likely the first time it’s ever been an issue.
Thanks for the note and I hope this helps others out as well,
A.C.
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Glad it is fixed!
I am receiving error message: ID 0x8CCCOOO3 and cannot do anything to rid it from my windows live. Please tell the me correct this by using the RUN: CMD Server mail.sonic.net (or whatever I should type in) to fix this menacing problem. Frustrated! I have deleted every know picture e-mail received to no avail. I have tried troubleshoot Win.Live Ess. to no avail. HELP. Thank you in advance?
Linda, the ssl certificate responsible for this error was replaced a few minutes after you posted your message. It should all be working again now.