Any web designer out there has had problems in the past with emails seemingly vanishing or bounce back messages coming back with various warnings and not known where to begin to look to see where the problem lies. You can ask you’re web hosting company to investigate for you but there are ways you can help yourself and hence resolve the problem quicker and we’re put some of them below.

Emails Don’t Vanish…

The first thing to say is that emails don’t simply vanish never to be seen again (or very very rarely).  Usually an email problem is reported back to you so if it’s a customer of your’s you can start the tracking by asking some very simple questions:

  1. When did they send the email
  2. Who did they send the email to
  3. What bouceback did they get
  4. Did an error message appear when trying to send and what was it

Very simple questions but ones which 9 times out of 10 can solve the problem. You can immediately see if they mis-spelt the address (more common than you might thing!), if they sent an email at a time you were restarting something on the server.

If neither of the above find the solution then onto the next steps, what error messages were received? This is key to tracking things down so if your customer either can’t remember or doesn’t have it to hand get them to send it you as otherwise you’re in the dark.

Email Error Messages

Typically email errors come in 2 forms, a direct error from the email client like outlook or a bounceback email.

Email Error From Outlook (or other client)

If the error comes from the email browser than usually the error is to do with either their connection to the server or local setup. Therefore a quick test is to simply setup the email account on your computer, test it and if all works the issue is on your customers computer and then thats a troubleshooting pc connection issues kind of thing. Issues like username / password / server address being incorrect are quite common.

Email Bounce Backs

The other type of warning an email has not gone through is from an email bounceback. Bouncebacks contain some great information if you know where to look. Typically the bounceback will come with a load of technical information in it but somewhere in it will be a key sentence like ‘recipient not found’ or ‘user doesn’t exist’. However some common bouncebacks are:

Mailbox does not exist
As the name suggests, the email address you are trying to send to doesn’t exist.

Mailbox Full
Again, as the name suggests the mailbox is full and can’t take any more emails

You have been greylisted
Greylisting isn’t as bad as you might think. Greylisting simply means that it’s the first time you have sent an email to that mailserver and they want to vet you’re a valid email sender. As such all you need do is send the email again and you’ll be allowed to send to the recipient.

You have been blacklisted / listed on a DNS blacklist
This isn’t so good – it means you have been listed on one of the many DNS blacklists for spamming. The first thing to do in this case is see if you are indeed blacklisted. An easy way to check blacklists is over at mx toolbox who provide a free dns blacklist checker for you to double check.

If you have been blacklisted then it means you’re server has been caught sending spam. If you are on a shared server then contact your web hosting company who should deal with this for you. If it’s your server then you need to identify and stop the source of the spam immediately. You should begin with looking at the email server logs and see if you can identify a email address which is sending out vast quantities of emails. It won’t be hard to spot as you need to spam a fair bit to get blacklisted. If you need help you can ask us or pop along to the guys at swordfish hosting for some free email security advice.

Once you have identified and stopped the cause (and only then) get in contact with the blacklist you are on and ask to be de-listed giving all the steps you have taken to stop the spamming.

Next: Tracking down missing incoming emails

Above we’ve looking at things to look for if you’re client can’t send or has missing sent emails but next we’ll look at how to track down missing inbound emails and the checks you can do.