What is happening?

As Symantec strives to enhance and improve the stability of its Email Security.cloud service, we will be migrating all processing of messages from Hong Kong and Sydney data centers to data centers in the US.  Currently over 93% of our Asia Pacific customer base are processing their email in the US infrastructure.  For the 7% of customers being migrated to US infrastructure we expect no additional delivery latency and with processing time being the biggest factor with end-to-end delivery latency, there is the possibility that latency will decrease due to the fact that there is newer, faster hardware running in the US infrastructure.  Another benefit for these customers will be a decrease in the amount of time it takes for configuration changes to propagate. 

Is there anything customers need to do?

Customers who have setup the service correctly according to technical requirements (have inbound mx records and outbound smarthosts pointing to the appropriate Symantec hosts and have mail servers configured to accept email from the full range of IP addresses used by the Email Security.cloud service) will not be required to make any changes and the migration will be completely transparent. Symantec has proactively been communicating and working with customers to rectify issues where it has recognized setting misconfigurations which may impact mail delivery.

How can I ensure mail routing is set up correctly?

Domains using the Asia Pacific infrastructure should be configured as follows:

Inbound email:

Depending on the cluster you are provisioned on, your mx records should be pointing to one of the followings hosts and backup hosts:

cluster1.ap.messagelabs.com and cluster1a.ap.messagelabs.com

cluster2.ap.messagelabs.com and cluster2a.ap.messagelabs.com

cluster1.hk.messagelabs.com and cluster1a.hk.messagelabs.com

cluster2.hk.messagelabs.com and cluster2a.hk.messagelabs.com

Outbound email:

Again, depending on which cluster you are provisioned on, your outbound email should be smarthosted to one of the followings hosts:

cluster1out.ap.messagelabs.com

cluster2out.ap.messagelabs.com

cluster1out.hk.messagelabs.com

cluster2out.hk.messagelabs.com

If I restrict SMTP traffic from my internet gateways which IP address ranges should I accept SMTP traffic from?

Your SMTP Gateways are required to allow SMTP traffic from Symantec IP ranges listed in Table 3-1 found in the document below:

http://images.messagelabs.com/EmailResources/implementationguides/subnet_ip.pdf

Will there be any impact if some of my domains are already provisioned on and have messages being processed by other clusters apart from Sydney and Hong Kong?

No, customers with domains already provisioned and MX records directed to use other clusters apart from Sydney and Hong Kong can continue to use those clusters.

When will this migration happen?

This migration is scheduled for Monday, January 30th.  Again the change will be transparent to customers utilizing proper technical service configuration.

May I test the US infrastructure in advance of the planned migration?

Customers may conduct early testing of the US infrastructure, but this will require some manual changes to be made. In order to test, clients will need to modify a domain’s mail routing as follows:

Inbound email:

Lowest MX preference (default mail route):        MX 10 cluster8.us.messagelabs.com

Second MX preference (back-up mail route):      MX 20 cluster8a.us.messagelabs.com

Outbound email:

Configure outbound email to be directed to: cluster8out.us.messagelabs.com