How To Troubleshoot Email Delivery Problems
There is nothing more flustering when your emails don’t come through.
This is one of our most “cursed out” reasons on phone support, and I really can’t blame people. If my email isn’t coming in as it should; I freak out!
Email is essential to any business or individual so having problems is a lot like losing power or being “cut off” from the world.
Luckily there are a number of different things you can do to diagnose email issues and most of the time the fix is pretty simple.
Check your DNS settings
Most email issues occur when you first setup your hosting or move providers.
The first thing I recommend people check when they update their name servers is their DNS Report. This is completely free and it updates in real time.
Simply navigate to IntoDNS.com, enter your domain, and view the report.
You’re looking for any red boxes (yellow is fine in some cases).
If you have any red though, you need to address it immediately by either fixing the error (i.e. missing DNS entry) or by reaching out to our support team to correct it for you.
Missing MX Records:
This is one of my example websites which you can see doesn’t have MX records or an A record. Email will not work!
For this website, I’m using Cloudflare to host the DNS so I would need to login to my account and create the proper records.
If you’re using our AppsGators name servers (or your private reseller name servers) the MX records will be automatically created.
Check the Webmail client
If you’re not getting email on your phone, computer, or other mail client, it’s always best to check our Webmail to make sure it’s routing to the server.
As long as you’re hosting your email with us at AppsGators (and not a third party provider such as G Suite) you can check your webmail by going to https://www.yourdomain.com/webmail (make sure to replace it with your domain).
You should then login with your email address and password.
After login, you’ll need to select one of our Webmail clients and then proceed to your inbox:
In my opinion all of these Webmail clients look like they’re straight from the 1990s, but I personally like using SquirrelMail to diagnose issues.
Once logged in you should look to see if emails are hitting the inbox. If so and you’re not seeing them in your email client (i.e. phone, computer, etc.) then you should double check your incoming mail server, ports, username, and password.
Track Delivery in cPanel
One of my favorite features inside of cPanel is their “track delivery” option.
Simply login to cPanel -> Track Delivery. It’ll show you exactly what’s going on with all of your email:
This is actually one of the first things our support techs are going to do if you call in with mail problems as it will likely show if any server-side errors are happening.
Notice the different statuses in the “Result” column. It’ll let you know if email was filtered out for Spam, rejected, or accepted to the inbox. If you click the blue “i” you can get even more helpful info about the specific email.
How to Fix your Email
Once you track down what’s going on you can then begin taking necessary actions to repair it. The above three items explain how to see the errors, but if you need help resolving them feel free to reach out to our team and it would be our pleasure to assist!
If you’re using a third-party provider such as G Suite we maybe limited to the support we can provide, but we can at least check and ensure your MX records are properly set.
