For most business professionals, if your email is not working, you’re not working. Email provides a major path of communication around the clock for businesses. So, what do you do when your email stops working? Once you’re done yelling at your computer or device, there are some basic troubleshooting steps you can take to figure out where the problem is coming from. 

Problem: Bouncebacks

If you send an email and it comes back to you the first thing you should do read the bounceback message. Most of the time, it will tell you why your email was blocked. The email address you are sending to may not exist anymore or you could be on the recipient’s block list. If the bounceback message is hard to understand it may have been blocked because the message looked like spam. Your email could also have been put on a black list because of the server’s poor reputation. If you are caught sending spam, or someone hacks into your account and uses it to send spam you may be put on a black list. The black list will need to be contacted to have you delisted. This is something your IT Company can help you with.

Problem: Can’t send or receive

Make sure you have an Internet connection. Once you verify that an Internet connection is there the problem could be how your mail program is configured. In a corporate environment, these steps may be handled by the IT administrator. If not in a corporate environment, double check the user name and password. This is a common issue and can be checked easily. Also verify the pop3 (incoming) and smtp (outgoing) configuration have been configured according to the email providers direction. Most email providers have a quick setup guide that you can navigate to from their web portal. You also want to make sure that the email account you are using has been properly created. Sometimes, these problems may lie in the router being configured incorrectly. Occasionally the problem lies with the provider and it may just take a phone call to them to ask them if they are experiencing any problems or have made any changes to your account without informing you.

Problem: Can receive, but can’t send.

There are two major things to check here. Check to make sure that Port 25 isn’t blocked on your network. This is the main Port that most email goes through. Also, make sure that your mail settings have been properly set up and that you are using authentication in your outgoing mail.

Problem: Can send, but can’t receive

First check to make sure that you have enabled your mail service. Then check to see if a forwarder has been set up for that account. A forwarder will send the mail to another email address. If you do this, you should always have a copy sent to the original address as well. You will also want to check to see if you have exceeded your Disk Quota. This may be something you need to ask your email host to check and adjust.

If email problems are getting in the way of your daily office functions, NetComplete has a Complete Mail solution for you. Call us today at (407)409-7374.