Service Announcements Posts

If you are a T-Mobile subscriber, you may have noticed that your Total Connect alerts have just stopped coming to your phone. This is the case for all of our users, and we have been getting calls about it for the last two days. If that is what you're experiencing, then please follow the steps below to restore your text messages.

• Go to the Total Connect 2.0 website, and log in to your account.
• Hover over the user whom you want to receive the text messages and select "Edit."
• Under "Notifications," add a new method for receiving messages. Select "Email." Select "Text Email" as "Notification Type."
• Put in [your10digitphonenumber]@tmomail.net. For example: 9549335095@tmomail.net.
• Save, and then go through the process of verifying the email. The verification number will come to your phone. Once verified, you should be good to go.

If you have any questions, or a problem with setting this up, we will gladly help you fix it. Please email us at support@alarmgrid.com. But for the most part if you follow the instructions here, everything should work with no trouble.

Alarm Grid's tech support will be closed on Christmas Eve (Dec. 24th) and Christmas day (Dec. 25th).

Should you have a pressing technical issue, please email support@alarmgrid.com. Otherwise, please call our office number 888-818-7728 and leave a message. We will get back to you as soon as we get back from the holidays.

Worry not, the central station will be up and running, monitoring your alarm system through the holidays.

We wish you all a wonderful holiday season, and hope that it is filled with family and friends.

Happy Birthday America!

We know that you are all going to be picnicking and watching fireworks for the next couple days... and so are we. Alarm Grid's offices are going to be closed on Friday the 3rd.

As usual, your accounts are all monitored 24/7. If you need central station services, please call 888-818-7728 (the big blue number at the top of the site), and dial extension 1. If you have any other questions, please feel free to email support@alarmgrid.com. A ticket will be generated and we will get to them as soon as we can.

Have a wonderful 4th of July, celebrate well, and do what your mothers' taught you to do when handling fireworks. Oh... and if you eat a hot dog this weekend, think of Alarm Grid. We'll do our darndest to keep the thieves at bay while you go out and celebrate!

We will be serving you diligently during the next two days (May 28 and 29). But we're admittedly not going to be running at full capacity. We will be running at half capacity all day. So we're asking all of our amazing customers to have some patience. The techs you have come to know and love are doing training during this time so that we can bring you even better, faster service.

Before you call, we would love if you considered first sending an email to support@alarmgrid.com. We can answer emails more quickly than we can get back to phone calls, especially considering that many of the Alarm Grid techs will be able to check mail during training. If you do call, and no one takes your call, please leave us a message. Rest assured that we will get you in the queue and call you back in the order you called us. Also, we're going to do our best to have the on-site chat channels manned all day. Feel free to use that.

We are going to add 2Gig's GoControl security system and peripheral products over the course of the next few weeks. This expansion from Honeywell-only, will give our customers choice with one of the most recognized (though new) brands in the security space. Like Honeywell's Total Connect, 2Gig is generally intended for use with alarm.com. While we absolutely love the incredible features of Total Connect, Alarm.com is another gerat platform that we are proud to begin offering sometime in the next couple months. Again, for you, that means you will have the choice between two of the best security products in the space.

For 2Gig fans out there who have been anticipating our foray into the much loved brand, we promise that we will be giving it the same sort of love we have given all our previous security systems. FAQs, documents, compatibility pages, videos and more are coming! If you have been waiting for Alarm.com + Alarm Grid, you won't have to wait much longer!

Happy holidays everyone!

Remember, while your systems are monitored 24/7 by the good folks at Criticom, our tech team is going to be taking a little break this holiday. Below are the Alarm Grid hours. If you need help, please email support@alarmgrid.com (emailing is the fastest way to get a response) or leave a message when you call 888-818-7728. We will do our best to respond quickly.

• Dec. 24th - Half day. Closing at 2PM EST.
• Dec. 25th - CLOSED
• Dec. 26th-Dec. 30th - Open
• Dec. 31 - Closing at 5PM EST
• Jan 1st - CLOSED
• Jan 2nd - Normal hours resume (Monday-Friday - 9AM-9PM EST, Saturday & Sunday - CLOSED)

We wish you all very well this holiday season, and hope you all have a wonderful week filled with cheer, happiness, and of course, safety. We sent out a nice little e-card to those who are signed up for our monitoring service. So, for those of you who didn't get to see the card, here it is. Please, leave the Alarm Grid team a message. We love hearing from all of you, and we promise that we are reading them all!

Happy 4th of July Alarm Grid! And Happy Birthday America!

We just wanted to relay the message: we're Closed Today.... Too Busy Being All Patriotic....

We wish you all the best of health. Stuff yourself with hot dogs, wave flags, and shoot rockets off in your back yard (if you're in a state where it's legal). Just be safe and follow the rules!

Remember, if you are getting the itch and work on your panel today, call the central station and put your panel on test. THE CENTRAL STATION IS ALWAYS OPEN. So if you need them, feel free to call our main line, (888-818-7728) and press 1. A friendly, helpful operator will pick up right away. For those of you who are having fun instead of working on your security system, toast a beer (or diet coke if you're me) to America and eat a hot dog.

During the last few days, Alarm Grid customers who are using AT&T as their cell phone service provider have indicated to our support team that the messages are coming in from different phone numbers. While not a huge inconvenience for most Total Connect users, for those who have setup alerts based on the phone number from which the message is coming are probably not getting the audible notifications that the audible notification of a message from Total Connect has stopped. The way to get around the issue is to change your AT&T SMS email recipient in your Total Connect 'Users' settings to an email address instead. Use the email address of your 10-digit number@mms.att.net. As the Total Connect SMS radial button option is really just a front end that tells the AlarmNet service to send an email to your 10-digit number@txt.att.net, this email setup is essentially doing the same thing as the SMS radial button. However, the key difference, and the reason is solves the problem of the ever changing contact on the Total Connect messages is that by sending it as an email you are having the messages come through AT&T's MMS gateway instead of their SMS gateway. For whatever reason, this solves the problem and all your messages will come from the same contact: totalconnect2.0@alarmnet.com so that you can setup a unique ring tone for your critical Total Connect notifications.

EDIT (Nov 1): We have noticed that a number of Alarm Grid customers have stopped receiving Total Connect messages if they are using the AT&T SMS setup on Total Connect. This was just an inconvenience before, as the messages would come through but they just would come from a different contact every time. Now it seems it has turned into a more serious issue where the messages don't come through at all if they are set up as SMS.

We're not sure what is causing this to happen, but we are aware of the problem and are working with AlarmNet to implement a solution for anyone who is experiencing the outage. We will give an update here as soon as we hear more. In the mean time, if you do the MMS email trick that we posted above, the messages will come through.

EDIT (Jan 13): Unfortunately, we have received reports that now even with the AT&T emails being set up to go to the @mms.att.net email gateway, customers with AT&T cell phones have stopped getting their Total Connect messages. We are still waiting for a fix from AlarmNet but in the mean time, we have developed a workaround. If you add your Gmail address as a Total Connect email recipient (and validate it), you can then use Gmail's filtering and forwarding features to have the emails pass through the Gmail account on their way to the cell phone. For some reason, this seems to bypass whatever was blocking the messages originally. If you are familiar with setting up Gmail filtering in your account, feel free to do it. If you are not, or would rather we help you with it, please give us a call (888-818-7728) or email support@alarmgrid.com, and we will work with you to make sure that you can get your email and text alerts.

Last week, Yahoo made a change to their DMARC policy. DMARC stands for Domain-based Message Authentication, Reporting and Conformance. It is an email authentication method meant to curb spoofing of email addresses and other abuses. On the surface, this change seems like it might be a positive one. After all, who among us does not hate email abuse? But in practice, the change had a lot of unintended consequences.

The change that Yahoo made no longer allows their emails to be sent from outside of their system. What that means in practice is that if you send an email from a yahoo address to an email address whose provider checks against DMARC (which is most reputable email providers), the email will not get through.

You may never be affected by the DMARC change, then again, you may have already been affected and not even known about it. If you sent an email from a yahoo email address in the last week to Alarm Grid, for example, we didn't get it. The reason is that when you send an email to support@alarmgrid.com, the way it works is that it goes from your email to a ticketing system, that ticketing system then forwards your email to our techs who use Gmail. Gmail sees that your email was sent from a Yahoo address, but that it was forwarded from our ticketing system, checks the DMARC policy, then rejects your email because it wasn't sent directly from the Yahoo address.

As you can imagine, this has been a major headache for us being that we are absolutely 100% about customer service, and this change has caused us to miss a massive numbers of questions and requests from our customers. So we wanted to apologize to anyone who sent us an email in the last week from a Yahoo address. We were not trying to ignore you, we simply did not see your email. If you are one of Alarm Grid's customers that this affected, you should be receiving a response to your message promptly as they are sitting in our ticketing system and we are auditing missed messages as we speak.

That said, since Yahoo seems to be uncommitted to resolving the havoc-wreaking issue caused by their change, even lauding this adjustment as a pioneering change that the rest of the industry is sure to follow, we recommend that you strongly consider changing your email from Yahoo to a provider that, as of yet, has not made unilateral decisions that break the way most people use the internet. Internally at Alarm Grid, we use Gmail. It is free, its storage capacity is incredibly large, and it's functionality is better than any paid service we have yet seen. Even so, there are plenty of other services out there that are both free and very functional. Going forward, while we will do our best to make sure that all emails are answered, it is our belief that your life will be made much easier if you begin the search for a new email provider.

Unfortunately, the President of Alarm Grid, Sterling Donnelly, has decided that tonight is the night to test out his new herd of flying reindeer. As you can imagine, flying reindeer through the air is a bit hazardous in this age of aviation. Because we don't want him getting hurt, all of us have decided to go and watch (supervise) President Donnelly as he performs his very unsafe antics. That said, as a result of Sterling's insistence on flying his reindeer around tonight, we are going to have to close the offices tomorrow, which means no tech support on Christmas day.

Tech support will also not be available on January 1st, but that's just because it's New Years day.

You can still reach the central station (as is always the case) and if there are problems, they will still be able to reach you.

That said, our hope is that all of you who are celebrating this very merry holiday are at home surrounded by those you love. And don't worry too much about us. Sterling is an experienced flying reindeer handler. He does this about once a year in a big red furry coat and hat, and he always insists on doing it Christmas Eve. We just like to watch to make sure that he's doing it as safely as possible.

We promise that we'll be back on December 26th, and we will be just as jolly the day after Christmas as we were the day before.

Oh, and before 2014 rolls on in, we just want to take a moment to thank you all for making Alarm Grid's first full year in service a successful one. We love serving you, and hope that 2014 brings with it many more opportunities to exceed your expectations.

Hello deal shoppers!

I'm sorry, you're not going to find any big sales on Alarm Grid today. It's not because you haven't found the super special secret page where we list them just for certain customers. It's because we don't actually run deals on Black Friday or Cyber Monday.... Actually, since we started Alarm Grid, we've never run any deals at all.

Why you ask? Will we ever run a deal?

Well, the why is really simple. We do our best to price our products as low as we possibly can. When we are cut a deal by our suppliers, we try to pass it off to you right away. We also try to manage our inventory very closely, so we don't end up with much overage each month.

Now the question of whether Alarm Grid will ever run deals is a bit more difficult. We aren't opposed to running deals when it is necessary. But we do find something a bit objectionable to the idea of giving some people one price, while giving the rest of you a different price simply because you purchased 1 day later or earlier. Our philosophy has been to be fair, up front, and very honest, and in some very existential way, deals run counter to that philosophy.

We're not going to state definitively that we will never run a sale, but as for the moment, don't bet on it happening any time soon.

If you're looking for that perfect security system that you want today, and you like what you see on Alarm Grid, go ahead and ask us anything you'd like to know. We're available by chat, by phone (888-818-7728) or by email: support@alarmgrid.com.

And we love to help!