Problems Receiving Email

Written By: Brad Markle
Experience Level: Beginner
Articles labeled as Beginner are those that require basic tasks to be completed, such as making simple configuration changes following a brief set of instructions. If you find yourself needing assistance, our Technical Support Department can generally assist.
Print E-mail:

This article offers assistance for those users that are unable to receive email.

What method do you use to check your email?

Webmail - examples include Horde, Squirrel Mail, and Roundecube.

An email client - examples include desktop applications such as Microsoft Outlook and Mac Mail, or from a device such as a mobile phone.

A combination of the above - an example would be checking your email at home/office using a desktop application, and then checking using webmail while at an alternate location.

The steps to troubleshoot this issue depend on the way you check your email. For example, if you use Microsoft Outlook to check your email, scroll down this page and begin at the, "Option 2: Checking for email via an email client" heading.

Option 1: Checking for email via webmail (Roundcude, Horde, or SquirrelMail)


If you send yourself an email and it does not arrive in your Webmail account, be sure that you are logging into Webmail using your full email address as the username, and not using your cPanel username as your Webmail username. Our Webmail flash video tutorials on the following page include instructions on how to properly log into Webmail:

http://support.inmotionhosting.com/userguides/webmail_flash_guide.html

If your email account is over its disk quota, you will not receive email as well. You can check your email account's quota by logging into your cPanel and clicking the Email Accounts icon. A list of email accounts will show, and next to each email account will be listed its quota and the actual amount of disk space that it is using. If it is over quota, delete email to free up space or click the Change Quota link next to the email account and increase the disk quota available for that email account.

If you have SpamAssassin enabled on your account, the emails that you are missing may have been identified as spam by SpamAssassin and either deleted or moved to a spam folder. If you see a spam folder, please check your spam folder. If you are receiving some but not all of your email, this is most likely the culprit. If you are not receiving any email at all, you'll want to continue to the next troubleshooting step.

On occasion, our System Administration team may migrate your account to another server. If you have received an email from us indicating that this has taken place, you'll want to be sure you're logging into the webmail on your new server and not your previous server. If you access webmail via YourDomain.com/webmail, then this shouldn't be a problem. If you access webmail via the server name, such as biz42.inmotionhosting.com/webmail, you'll want to reference the email sent to you for the new server name. For example, you may have been moved from the biz42 server to the sb57 server, in which case you would use sb57.inmotionhosting.com/webmail.

If you have external MX records in place, the server may be attempting to deliver your email locally on the server instead of delivering the email to the servers listed as your MX records. Please contact our support department if you do have custom MX records, and request that they review the domain's local/remote domains configuration. If you don't know whether or not you have external MX records in place, most likely you do not as such a change cannot be made without a written request to the Support Department.

If the above has not helped, please contact our Support Department for further assistance.

Option 2: Checking for email via an email client

If you haven't already, we recommend watching our flash video tutorials to see step by step how to properly setup your email account:

http://support.inmotionhosting.com/userguides/email_flash_guide.html

When you attempt to receive email, are you getting any error messages?

If you are receiving an error, it is best to review your email account's basic configuration in your email client.

Please ensure that you are using your FULL email address as your username, and not your cPanel username.

Please ensure you are using the correct password. Your email password is the password you set when you initially created the email account within cPanel.

Please ensure that you do not have an option enabled that is similar to, "Log on using Secure Password Authentication (SPA)"

If the error message you are receiving is actually a password prompt, please reset your email account's password within cPanel and test again. You can reset the email password by logging into your cPanel, accessing the Email Accounts section, and clicking the Change Password link next to the email account you are working with.

If you are getting an error message, but it is not a prompt asking for your username and password, contact our Support Department for further assistance and be ready to supply the full error message that you are receiving.

If you are not receiving any error messages, log into your Webmail and ensure that you have email in your INBOX for your email account to download. You can log into your webmail via YourDomain.com/webmail. Be sure to replace YourDomain.com with your actual domain name, use your full email address as your username, and use your email account's password as the password. If you see emails in your INBOX from within Webmail, then your email client should be able to download them. Open your email account's settings from within your email client and be sure that you have your POP/SMTP server set to mail.YourDomain.com, with YourDomain.com being your actual domain name.

If the above has not helped, please contact our Support Department for further assistance.

Option 3: Checking for email via a combination of both webmail and an email client

If you have setup an email account in your email client (Microsoft Outlook or Mac Mail for example) as a POP account, then you may not have the option enabled to leave a copy of the email on the server. By default, your pop account will connect to the mail server, download, and remove all email on the server for that particular email address. If you check with your email client first and then check with your webmail, your webmail will not be able to find any email as it was downloaded and removed from the mail server by your email client.

Most email clients solve this problem by allowing you to connect and leave a copy of the email on the server. This in turn allows you to download your email from more than one email client. This setting can be set within the advanced settings of most email clients. For example, in Microsoft Outlook Express:

Open the email account's settings, click the More Settings button, and then click the advanced tab. You will then see an option at the bottom to leave a copy of the email on the server.

In most email clients, you will also see an option to leave a copy of the email on the server, as well as to delete it after a set number of days. If you don't ever delete the email from the server, sooner or later you will reach the disk quota of your email account and will not be able to receive any new messages.

If this article has not helped, please contact our Support Department for further assistance.

 
Rating:
 
Please log in to rate this article.
Like this Article?
Notify Me of Updates!
Please login to subscribe to receive notifications when this article is updated.
Prerequisite Articles
None

Comments

Currently no comments

You must log in before commenting.

Need more Help?

Search
Current Customers
Chat:Click to Chat Now
Call:888-321-HOST (4678)
E-mail:support@InMotionHosting.com
Ticket Submit a Support Ticket
Ask the Community!
Get help with your questions from our community of like-minded hosting users and InMotion Hosting Staff.
Not a Customer?
Get web hosting from a company that is here to help. Sign up today!

Follow InMotion Hosting!

 3758 Followers. Follow Us!

Have a Question?

If you need some help, submit your question to our Community!
We guarantee a response within 60 minutes (8am - 5pm EST, Monday - Friday)

Recent Questions