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Gmail Requiring SPF Records

We are getting more and more support requests from people having trouble sending email to Gmail and Google hosted domains.   This is currently almost always the result of an email domain not having an SPF record.  That is a fairly technical sentence, so click the link for detailed information on SPF.   The simplified version is that an SPF record specifies what servers are allowed to send email for your email address.   It was designed to help combat spam.  If you don’t have one of those records, Google is now rejecting the email with an error message similar to the one below:

–BEGIN

host gmail-smtp-in.l.google.com[74.125.195.26] said:
   550-5.7.26 The MAIL FROM domain [<your domain>] has an SPF record
   with 550-5.7.26 a hard fail policy (-all) but it fails to pass SPF checks
   with the 550-5.7.26 ip: [17.57.156.17]. To best protect our users from spam
   and 550-5.7.26 phishing, the message has been blocked. Please visit
   550-5.7.26  https://support.google.com/mail/answer/81126#authentication for
   more 550 5.7.26 information.

 

–END

In the past, Google would just send the offending message to the Spam folder, but now if the SPF record is missing or fails (as the one above), the message will be rejected.

This can also be caused by “forwards”.  For instance, if you have an email address hosted with us, but choose to forward incoming email to a personal Gmail account, you will most likely lose some email as a result of this policy.   Senders trying to reach you will receive a failure notice, but there is no way to “fix” this except to check your email in the account rather than forwarding it to another external email address.

 

2022-09-20T11:01:02-05:00September 20, 2022|Documentation, News and Updates|Comments Off on Gmail Requiring SPF Records

SIPTrunk.com Issues

September 19, 2022 – Some VOIP customers are reporting that their main line is going to their failover number.   We have been able to work around this issue by pointing the failover to another number on the trunk.  Another fix is to re-register the trunk, which can be done by a reboot or upgrade of the system.  The 3CX company has released an upgrade today which will accomplish the reboot.    Please let us know if you are experiencing this issue and we will initiate an upgrade/reboot of your system to clear the problem.

 

Update 1:15pm – We have been told that a change has been made upstream and that the issue should be resolved.   If you are still seeing this, please let us know.

 

Note:  The 3CX PBX update to 18.5 has been released and most systems will update on Wednesday.  This is unrelated to the above issue.

 

 

2022-09-19T13:22:18-05:00September 19, 2022|News and Updates, VOIP|Comments Off on SIPTrunk.com Issues

Mail Server Maintenance

September 12, 2022 8:30pm – We’ve got to perform a small bit of maintenance on the mail server system which will interrupt connections for a brief time but will not result in any lost email.   We will be posting updates here.

Update 8:48pm – This maintenance has been completed.

 

 

2022-09-12T20:49:15-05:00September 12, 2022|News and Updates|Comments Off on Mail Server Maintenance

Service Interruption

August 3, 2022 – 6:15pm –  We experienced a service interruption as there were routing issues upstream of us.  This affected all services – phones, offsite backups, email, web hosting, etc.  The interruption started at about 5:00pm CDT and resolved itself at about 6:12pm.   We are continuing to monitor.  This issue is outside of our management area, and we are currently just able to work with upstream providers to troubleshoot.

Currently, this looks to be resolved as the routing has changed upstream – presumably to route around the troubled equipment or circuits.

 

Update 8:30pm – We had an additional disruption starting around 8:15pm.   This could be the routes resetting to the “normal” settings if the underlying issue has been fixed.  As of 8:30, everything seems OK, but we are continuing to monitor.

Update – August 4, 2022 – 6:45am – We have seen the issue return briefly a couple of times overnight.  Once around 1:15am and then a second time about 4:10am.  Each incident lasted approximately 15 minutes.  We still have an open ticket and are working to make sure the issue is properly fixed.

 

 

If you have any questions, please email us at support@internetpro.net.

 

2022-08-04T07:04:57-05:00August 3, 2022|News and Updates|Comments Off on Service Interruption

Office 365 Delivery Issues

July 20, 2022 – We have received some reports of users using Office 365 (Microsoft 365) services having trouble emailing our users.  The bounce back messages or non-delivery reports are stating that the issue is on the Microsoft side due to misconfigured PTR records.   A PTR record is similar to caller ID for computers. It allows one to look up the IP address and get a host name back.  Best practices state that this should be present for email delivery and in specific formats.  Here is an article about this for those of you who would like more information on it:  https://www.linuxmagic.com/best_practices/valid_ptr.html

It seems that Microsoft has made a change and is not following these practices at the moment.  We are looking into whether this is something that has been done by mistake and will be corrected or if they have done it on purpose for some reason.    We are currently very strict on PTR record validity because it does help us prevent spam.    Not all ISPs and email operators are as strict, so the Office 365 emails will go through to some addresses.    We will be posting updates on this as we have them.

Update 12:00pm – We have confirmed with our email vendor that this is a Microsoft issue that has been going on about 12 hours.  It is being discussed by the major email providers but Microsoft has not released a statement as yet, so there is not currently an estimated time to repair.

 

Update July 22 11:00am – We have not seen any statement from Microsoft on this, but have also not been seeing the issues continuing, so we do believe that Microsoft has corrected this on their end.  If you are still seeing the problem, please let us know by calling 256-547-6817 or emailing support@internetpro.net.

 

 

2022-07-22T11:05:39-05:00July 20, 2022|News and Updates|Comments Off on Office 365 Delivery Issues

Email System Maintenance

June 18, 2022 1:00pm – We are performing some required maintenance on the email system.  There will be some brief interruptions in client (email program) connectivity and webmail availability.  As part of this maintenance, we will also be performing some updates to security as well as usability including some modernizing of the webmail system.  No email will be lost, but there may be some slight delivery delays.  We’ll be posting updates here.  If you have any questions, please give us a call at 256-547-6817 as email to support@internetpro.net may be affected.

 

Update 1:50pm – This maintenance has been completed with very minimal interruption to customers.  If your email program had been left open during this maintenance, it is possible that it may prompt for a password.  Closing the email program and re-opening should resolve this.  As long as you do not enter a new password, the email program will remember the correct one which was being used.

Update 5:30pm – A customer notified us of an issue when connecting using SSL on port 465.   This was a result of our maintenance and has been corrected.

 

In initial testing, we are seeing a noticeable speedup in the web interfaces for our system.  In the coming months, we’ll be rolling out some additional features on the groundwork put in place today.   The older Tuxedo interface has now been replaced by the “New Tuxedo” version with more features and better performance.

If you have any questions or concerns about the work performed, please contact us at 256-547-6817 or email support@internetpro.net.

 

 

2022-06-18T17:38:38-05:00June 18, 2022|News and Updates|Comments Off on Email System Maintenance

Certificate Updates

June 9, 2022 – We will be renewing a wildcard secure certificate today (*.internetpro.net).  This certificate protects/encrypts many pages and services including POP3, IMAP, SMTP, and web services on multiple servers.  There may be a brief interruption of these services as we load the new certificate.  This is a trusted certificate, so you should not get any errors during the process.  However, Apple devices sometimes do not handle certificate renewals well, so if you do get an error, please let us know by emailing support@internetpro.net, calling 256-547-6817, or using the chat window on this page.

We will post an update when the work is complete.

 

Update:  11:30am – This work has been completed.  We did not detect any issues or downtime at all.  Please let us know if you are experiencing issues which may be related.

 

 

2022-06-09T11:29:13-05:00June 9, 2022|News and Updates|Comments Off on Certificate Updates

Siptrunk Issue

May 7, 2022 – It has come to our attention that some customers are having trouble receiving calls.  Last night, around 10:30pm CDT, Siptrunk.com apparently had some sort of outage.  We did notice that most customer phone systems lost registration to the service.  However, after about 45 minutes, systems re-registered and seemed to be normal.   This morning, we are finding that the phone systems are able to make calls out, but that something we assume is related to the outage is preventing calls from coming in.  Customers with failover options in place at Siptrunk.com are receiving calls using those options.   This also affected our office.   The solution is to force the phone system itself to re-register with the Siptrunk.com trunk.  Another option would be a reboot of the phone system itself.   We are in the process of proactively connecting to customer systems to re-register their trunks, but wanted to post this message in case we missed anyone.  This issue does seem to only be affecting customers using 3CX phone systems.

Update: 12:40pm – We continue to see upstream issues.  We were in the process of registration of customer phone systems as stated above when registration was lost again on many of them.  Siprtrunk.com states that they are having “routing problems with gw1.siptrunk.com” but we are now seeing an invalid certificate at https://login.siptrunk.com and we are unable to call them or log in to their page, so there is definitely more going on than just some “routing problems”.   We will continue to try to get more information and will post updates here.

 

Update: 12:55pm – We received this response: “Datacenters are hard down right now.”     We’ll let you know anything further as information comes in to us.

Update 1:05pm – New information from Siptrunk.com:  “Looks like everything is coming back up. Issues with gw1 are still present.”

Update 1:20pm – Siptrunk.com reports that everything should be back to normal.   We are continuing to check customer phone systems to confirm.

Update 1:45pm – Things seem to be returning to normal.  We are now seeing systems re-registering themselves instead of having to be done manually.  If you are still experiencing issues, please let us know by calling 256-547-6817 and choosing 8 for support if it is during the weekend or emailing support@internetpro.net.

2022-05-07T13:48:24-05:00May 7, 2022|News and Updates, VOIP|Comments Off on Siptrunk Issue

Server Maintenance

April 16, 2022 – We’re doing some needed server maintenance this Easter weekend to minimize business impact.   During the maintenance, some websites may briefly go offline.   If you see anything unusual on your website, please let us know by emailing support@internetpro.net.   These updates do include some PHP version changes, but they should be non-breaking changes.

 

2022-04-16T10:17:53-05:00April 16, 2022|News and Updates|Comments Off on Server Maintenance

Web Server Issue

March 4, 2022 – 10:00am – One of our web servers has suffered a failure that is affecting some of our shared hosting sites.  We are working to address the problem.  Originally, a RAID array lost a drive and it was replaced as normal, but apparently the rebuild process failed and we are seeing degradation in service.  We will be posting updates here as we have them.

Update 1:45pm – The server with the failed RAID array is currently offline as we work to repair the issue. Some sites will be offline until this process is completed. We will update this post with further information as we continue the repairs.

Update 6:45pm – We’ve recovered the filesystem, but unfortunately have some corruption in the database system of the affected server.  We’re working on restoring from backups but are running into some corruption issues.

Update 10:30pm  – We have successfully restored a few sites and have a procedure for restoring the rest.  Sites will be coming up as we restore them.

Update 11:15pm – We believe all sites except for one have been restored to full functionality and we have informed the owners of the affected site.   If you are still experiencing an issue with your website, please email us at support@internetpro.net to let us know and we will investigate it further.  We do apologize for this issue.

March 5, 2022 – 8:30am – We’re going to attempt one last effort to get the one website still having issues recovered.  The effort will affect all other sites briefly.  We’ll update here as to the success or failure and the conclusion of the event.

Update 8:50am – Failure.   The site in question was in the midst of a redesign, so we’re pressing forward with that.  There should be no more service interruptions related to this outage.

 

 

 

2022-03-05T09:11:43-06:00March 4, 2022|News and Updates|Comments Off on Web Server Issue
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