Advisory: Reflexion - Delayed delivery of outbound and inbound email

At this point the amount of information shared is definitely not enough.

I need a timeframe for restoration of service.  I need to understand how this issue took down the entire reflexion network with all of their supposed redundancy's

I have clients threatening lawsuits and frankly don't need the aggravation not to mention calling in to the support number gets crickets

We had interesting call with Reflexion a few weeks ago and found out that the service is not being supported as well as it should to maintain reliability and up-time. If you haven't already you should contact your VAR or Sophos rep and request a 1-to-1 license exchange for Sophos Email Security, which integrates with Sophos Central. Email Security has many features that Reflexion doesn't have such as checking the links in messages before they're sent to you and putting tags on emails that come from outside the organization. There's a high level of customization as well.

Feel free to PM me if you need details on how we did out migration and integrated with our XG-series firewalls through Sophos Central.

Sophos Email Security link: https://www.sophos.com/en-us/products/sophos-email.aspx

This is inexcusable. Outages are understandable. The response is not.

I have changed my domain MX records for now to get up and running. Will definitely be looking into alternatives starting tomorrow.

Due to the lack of response and information from the Reflexion support team, I've spent my entire day updating our client DNS settings to bypass Reflexion. I hope that you can give us a real update soon as an entire business day of down email puts us in a very bad position with our clients. 

You do realize that saying the same thing over and over is not an "update," right?

At this point there are only two possibilities.  Either Sophos does not WANT to tell us what is going on, or Sophos does NOT KNOW what is going on.  Both are equally troubling.

Are you insane?  You are trusting Sophos with your email after this?!?  Reflexion worked great until Sophos bought it out and now their response and reliability have been TERRIBLE.  If they were competent or had any clue they would have taken care of the Reflexion system and migrated everyone off it before allowing it to fail.  Clearly there response is "Well we bought this product, decided not to tell anyone but decided to stop supporting it, and we offer no easy migration path to anything else.  But please trust us this other product over here that is more expensive will work much better..."  I will never use another Sophos product or service with any client ever and neither should anyone who cares about customer service, reliability, or reposnsiveness.  MIMECAST is better than anything Sophos is capable of.  Sonicwall is far better than the XG routers.  Ubiquiti for any wireless needs.  Crowdstrike for antivirus.

The Issue is Very Simple Sophos Reflexion is going the way of the UTM. Lack of support out of site out of mind. If you are not on the central platform you are doing it wrong apparently. 

I had an interesting chat with my channel manager today and needless to say this service has gone the ways of being not supported. 

The 99% promise is no longer the way with this service.

I have had to update all my MX Records and DNS to point to other solutions in the interim. 

I would recommend the same be done

Such a shame

The problem here is THEY NEVER TOLD ANYONE.  You had to call them on your own to learn this.  It was also completely stupid on their end to basically stop support Reflexion without warning and without getting everyone off first.  A good analogy is to a boat on the ocean.  The cast Reflexion adrift and set it on fire and didn't tell the passengers to get onto another boat.  Then when passengers are scrambling for help they turn off the support lines and chat.  This should have been announced at least a year ago with deadline like migrate off Reflexion by 7/30/2019 as it will be unsupported.  Kinda like what Microsoft is doing with Windows 7.  Instead they give no warning just leaving partners out to dry...  Great company, I am sure you can trust their new email spam service... Until they stop supporting it with no notice and its BROKEN 

I'd like to think I have some level of sanity left. I agree that Sophos should have better communicated their commitment to Reflexion. Unfortunately, even the largest players such as Microsoft have had similar service issues (such as with their 2FA) even recently that locked users out for an entire day. I think it's a crap shoot as to who will suffer downtime next. I quick Google of "Mimecast outage" reveals they had a full day of outage at one point, suffered downtime from a DDoS attack, and other isolated issues that caused downtime for their customers.

The takeaway here is that there are many better services than Reflexion and we should all be making plans to migrate away from it ASAP.

Sophos, you failed to provide a reliable service offering and cut-over plan. There's no reason for you to support two overlapping platforms. You need to reach out to your customers provide a migration path now.

Honestly, I've been working with Reflexion for a long time, probably close to 8 years. It's always had little problems, similar to this. Email delays were a commonplace. Never ever communicated anything about it to us. Always random issue. Always little things. They only use SPF record to check against, nothing else. That alone, is ground for changing providers. Toss in support that is hit or miss, and a mantra that their technology 'algorithm' is so advanced they cannot provide explanations as to why something was marked a certain score. Just a sad day to be on Reflexion.