Troubleshooting common email issues

It’s inevitable, something’s gone wrong – usually just when you need to send that important email to your client. Thankfully the answer is often a simple fix and this blog post should help you identify the issue. Here are some tips for troubleshooting common email issues.

Checking your email deliverability.

Email sometimes goes to spam, it’s unfortunate but we do what we can to mitigate the issue. If your mail isn’t reaching your recipient’s inbox, then try sending a test email to each of a Gmail, Hotmail, and Yahoo accounts. If it’s received OK on those popular services then it is likely a problem on the specific recipient domain that you are sending to. Corporate networks can use their own combination of blacklists and filtering rules, so it might just be one domain that you are having problems reaching.

Achieving perfect email deliverability all the time is near impossible, so there will be times when your email might land in the spam folder or get outright rejected. If this happens then report it to us by contacting us or submitting a support ticket.

The information we’ll need are: sending email address, receiving email address, and time and date you sent the email. If you received a “Mail delivery failure” or similar message then please forward it to us.

See our post about setting up SPF, DKIM, and DMARC to see what else can you can do to improve your email deliverability.

Can you access the server?

Sometimes you can’t access the server at all. Maybe Outlook is failing to connect in order to send and receive in the first place. If the network connection is down or blocked then that could be the cause of your problems.

The easiest way to check this is to try logging into webmail at https://yourdomain.com:2096 (replace “yourdomain.com” with your actual domain name). Logging into webmail is a very useful test as a successful login confirms (1) that you can connect to the server – so no network issue, (2) that you can log in to your email – so no username/password issue, and (3) it shows you what email is on the server. Compare the email shown in webmail to what is shown in your email client (Outlook), if there are new messages in webmail that aren’t showing in Outlook then you likely have a problem with your connection or Outlook settings.

What if you can’t access webmail?

If the page not loading at all then try visiting your website. If your website is also not loading then you might have a network issue (check some other websites, or the useful tool downforeveryoneorjustme.com). You could also have been inadvertently blocked by our firewall. See below for more on this.

Second, if you can view the webmail login page but it rejects your username and password, then check your password. Contact your IT person (or us) for help resetting your email account password in cPanel.

Check you aren’t blocked by our firewall.

We take data security seriously, but this does sometimes mean a trade-off in convenience. For normal operations it all works fine but sometimes extra security measures can be a hindrance to everyday operations. Basically it means you could find yourself blocked by our firewall. This is quite a common cause of client email issues.

Our firewall will block any IP address that makes repeated failed IMAP login attempts – so be careful of those passwords. When setting up your email accounts or changing passwords you want to be sure that you type them correctly, since multiple failed attempts will trigger a temporary block, and then further attempts will make it permanent – until you notify us to remove it.

Blocking by IP address can also cause your whole office to get blocked – that’s not good for you or for us.

The simple way to check and remove a block is to log in to our client area at https://manage.hostasean.com/clients and go to the Support menu, and the Unblock IP dropdown item. This page will allow you to search for and remove any blocks. If you have any trouble just drop us an email to support@nullhostasean.com and we’ll check for you, it’s useful if you can include your IP address or just your country location.

You can see what your current IP address is by visiting this website: http://ip.hostasean.com

There are a million other things that can go wrong with email systems, but these should cover the most common email issues. If you have any other questions or anything you can’t solve yourself then please get in touch with us.