How to set up Default Sonas Email and Forward Email into Sonas

Overview

When you create a new venue in Sonas, we automatically generate a placeholder email address for it, in the format venue_initials@xxxxxx.sonas.email. For a venue with the initials GH, that looks something like gh@k4m9x2.sonas.email.

This address works straight away, so nothing is blocked while you get set up, but it is only ever meant to be a placeholder. A correctly configured Sonas account sends and receives on your own domain, so that:

• customers recognise and trust the sender, rather than seeing an unfamiliar address
• replies come back to an address your customers already have on file
• your emails are signed by your own domain, which helps them reach the inbox rather than the spam folder

Setting up your own domain is the last step of getting started, and this article covers it.
Until you complete it, treat the sonas.email address as a temporary stand-in.

The placeholder address is never deleted, so it stays available as a fallback. Once you set an address on your own domain as Active, Sonas stops sending from the placeholder.

Before you start

• You will need access to your domain's DNS records, or someone who has it.
• Decide which domain you want to use. If that domain is already validated in Sonas for marketing or bulk email, Sonas will block it as an incoming domain, because the DNS entries clash. Use a different domain or subdomain for incoming mail.
• A domain can only be claimed by one Sonas account.

Setting Up Outgoing Email

To configure outgoing emails with your custom domain:

1. Navigate to Company → Email Domains
2. Select Actions → + Outgoing Domain
3. Enter your custom domain (e.g. myvenue.com)

4. Click Ok to receive DNS configuration instructions. Sonas will show you two records to add:

• a CNAME for pm-bounces.yourdomain.com (the return path, or bounce, record)
• a TXT record (your DKIM signing key)

5. Add both entries through your DNS provider, exactly as shown. Watch for extra spaces, and do not append your domain to the host name if your DNS provider already does that for you.

6. Wait a few minutes for DNS propagation, then retry validation. DNS changes can take up to 24 hours to update globally, so if it does not validate straight away, try again later. Sonas checks both records, so the domain stays "Pending Validation" until each one passes.
7. Once validated, click + Address and complete the required fields:

• Venue, the venue this address belongs to
• Sender, the part before the @
• Display name, what recipients see as the sender name

8. Select the new address and click the green tick button (Set as Active Address). The address will change from Inactive to Active, and your emails will be sent from it

from now on.

Address naming rules

The part before the @ is restricted. It can only contain:

• letters a-z, numbers 0-9, underscores _ and hyphens -
• a maximum of 34 characters

Full stops and plus signs are not allowed, so sales.team@ or info+web@ will be rejected. Use sales-team@ or salesteam@ instead.

Each sender name must also be unique within a domain. Two venues cannot both use info@myvenue.com, so give each venue its own address, for example weddings@ and events@.

Important: every venue needs its own Active outgoing address.
Sonas chooses the From address by looking for the Active address belonging to that venue. If a venue has no Active address on a validated outgoing domain, emails for that venue will fail to send.

After you add a new venue, Sonas automatically gives it a placeholder address on the @xxxxxx.sonas.email domain and makes that one Active. Remember to return to Company → Email Domains, add an address for the new venue on your custom outgoing domain, and set it as Active. Otherwise that venue will carry on sending from sonas.email.

Setting Up Incoming Email

Sonas needs to be able to receive replies, not just send. Whichever address Sonas sends from is the address your customers will reply to, so that address has to end up in Sonas.

Rule of thumb: every address you set as Active for outgoing must also be forwarded, or MX routed, into Sonas. If you send from weddings@myvenue.com but only forward
info@myvenue.com, replies will never reach Sonas.

Set your Default Incoming Venue

Before anything else, on the Email Domains page, set Default Incoming Venue. Any email Sonas cannot confidently match to a specific venue's address is assigned to this venue. If it is not set, those emails cannot be processed at all.

Two methods are available.

Method 1: Email Forwarding (Recommended)

This approach does not change your current email MX records, so your existing mailboxes carry on working as normal. It uses forwarding rules instead.

1. In Sonas, note the incoming address for the venue. It looks like xx@xxxxxx.sonas.email and is listed under Incoming Domains.
2. In your email provider, forward emails from your custom domain (e.g. weddings@myvenue.com) to that Sonas address.
3. Send a test email from an outside address and check that it appears in Sonas.

You can configure this in your own email provider, or use a third party service such as:

• Forwardemail
• Improvmx
• Cloudflare
• Pobox

It must be automatic forwarding

Use a server side forwarding rule, a redirect rule, or your provider's "forward a copy to" setting. Do not use:

• Manual forwarding from a staff mailbox. The sender then becomes the staff member, so Sonas cannot match the email to the customer or their event.
• "Forward as attachment". Sonas will only see an empty wrapper message.

Web enquiry forms

If you forward enquiries from a website contact form, make sure the form sets Reply-To to the enquirer's address. Sonas prefers Reply-To over From when identifying the sender, which lets it match the enquiry to the right customer and event rather than to your web host.

Microsoft 365 and Outlook: enable external forwarding first

This is the most common reason forwarding silently fails on Microsoft 365. By default, Microsoft blocks automatic forwarding to external addresses, so your forwarding rule looks correct in the admin centre but every message bounces back.

You will receive a bounce that looks like this:

Your email couldn't be forwarded from weddings@myvenue.com to another email address.

Remote server returned `550 5.7.520 Access denied, Your organization does not allow external
forwarding. Please contact your administrator for further assistance. AS(7555)`

Because xxxxxx.sonas.email sits outside your organisation, Sonas counts as an external address and is blocked by this policy.

To fix it, a Microsoft 365 administrator needs to allow automatic forwarding:

1. Go to the Microsoft Defender portal at security.microsoft.com
2. Open Email & collaboration → Policies & rules → Threat policies → Anti-spam
3. Open Anti-spam outbound policy (Default) and click Edit protection settings
4. Under Automatic forwarding rules, change the setting from Automatic - System-controlled to On - Forwarding is enabled
5. Save, wait a few minutes, then send a test email

Menu names change from time to time in Microsoft 365. The setting you are looking for is Automatic forwarding rules, inside the outbound anti-spam policy.

If your IT policy does not allow forwarding to be enabled across the whole organisation, an administrator can instead create a mail flow rule that redirects mail for that specific address to your Sonas address. Mail flow rules are not affected by the automatic forwarding restriction.

Google Workspace: forwarding to an external address usually needs to be approved first. An administrator may need to add the Sonas address as an allowed recipient, or use Routing rules rather than a per user forwarding filter.

Method 2: Direct MX Record Replacement

This method requires technical expertise and involves updating your domain's MX record to point directly to Sonas:

Use caution. This redirects all mail for that domain to Sonas, so any existing mailboxes on that domain will stop receiving email. Only do this for a domain you use
exclusively with Sonas.

If you want mail delivered to Sonas while keeping your normal mailboxes, use a dedicated subdomain such as enquiries.myvenue.com as your incoming domain, or use Method 1 instead.

Once the MX record is in place, use Replace on your incoming domain in Sonas, then add an address for each venue.

You can add more than one address for the same venue, which is useful if you want separate sales and general enquiry addresses arriving in the same inbox.

Attachment and message size limits

• Outgoing: 10 MB in total per message, including the message body. Attachments grow by roughly a third when they are encoded for email, so an 8 MB file will exceed the limit. Share larger files as a link instead.
• Incoming: 35 MB. Emails larger than this will not reach Sonas at all.

Testing your setup

1. Sending. Send a test email from an event in Sonas and confirm the From address and display name are correct, and not @xxxxxx.sonas.email. Repeat this for each venue.
2. Receiving. From an outside address, such as a personal Gmail account, email your venue address and confirm the message appears in Sonas under the right venue.
3. Replies. Reply to a Sonas email from the customer's side and confirm the reply lands back on the same conversation and event.
4. Check for bounce messages in the forwarding mailbox. That is where the 550 5.7.520 error described above will appear.

Troubleshooting

Note: marketing and bulk email campaigns use a separate email integration with its own domain validation. Setting up your default Sonas email as described above does not configure marketing sends.

Updated on: 14/08/2026