Guide Email

How to fix email you are not receiving

A step-by-step way to find out why messages sent to your address are not arriving, from DNS to mailbox storage.

iFastHosting Support Team Updated 26 August 2026 8 min read Intermediate

Mail that never arrives can fail at several different points between the sender and your inbox, and each point needs a different check. Work through the causes below roughly in the order given — they are ordered from the ones that affect a whole domain to the ones specific to a single device.

1. Check the domain's MX records

MX records tell the internet which server should handle your domain's email. If they are missing, pointing at the wrong server, or were changed recently without the corresponding mailbox setup completed, nothing sent to that domain arrives at all — for anyone, not just one mailbox.

dig MX yourdomain.com +short

Compare the result against what your control panel shows as the correct MX record for your account. See what MX records are if you need the background, and allow time for a recent change to spread — see how long DNS propagation takes.

Recently changed nameservers is a common cause

If the domain's nameservers were changed recently for any reason — a website move, for instance — check whether the MX record survived the switch. Changing nameservers replaces every DNS record at once, and a mail record nobody thought to recreate on the new nameservers is one of the most common reasons email stops working right after an unrelated website change.

2. Check the mailbox itself is not full

A mailbox at its storage limit refuses new incoming mail outright, and the sender is bounced rather than the message being queued. Check current usage in the email section of your control panel — see what a mailbox quota is for how to free up space if this is the cause.

3. Check the spam or junk folder

Mail that arrived but was filtered is easy to mistake for mail that never arrived at all. Check the spam folder both in webmail directly and in any mail app you use — some apps hide or do not sync the spam folder by default depending on their settings.

4. Check for a forwarder sending mail elsewhere

If a forwarder exists on the address, incoming mail may be going to a different destination mailbox entirely rather than the one you are checking. Review the forwarder settings for the address in your control panel.

5. Check for a mail client sync problem

If mail is visible in webmail but not in a specific app, the problem is local to that device rather than to the mailbox. Check:

The account's connection status within the app, which usually shows an error if it cannot currently reach the server.
Whether the account is set to check manually rather than automatically.
Whether the password stored in the app still matches the mailbox's current password, particularly after a recent password change — see changing an email account password.

6. Ask the sender to check their side

If one specific person's mail to you is not arriving while everyone else's is, ask them to check for a bounce message in their own sent items or inbox — a rejected message usually generates one, and it often states the reason directly, such as your mailbox being full or your domain being on a blacklist their provider checks.

7. Check whether your domain is being filtered by a specific provider

If mail from one specific sender's domain never arrives while mail from everywhere else does, the problem may be on the sending side rather than yours — their domain could be missing SPF, DKIM or DMARC, or have a reputation issue of its own. This is worth ruling out before assuming the fault is with your mailbox.

Diagnostic checklist

Symptom	Most likely cause
No mail arriving from anyone, to any address on the domain	MX records, or the domain's DNS more broadly
No mail arriving to one specific address only	Mailbox quota, or a misconfigured forwarder on that address
Mail arrives in webmail but not in one app	That app's account settings or password
Mail from one sender never arrives, others are fine	Check spam folder, then the sender's own domain configuration

If you have worked through all of the above and mail is still not arriving, contact support with the sending address, the approximate time the message was sent, and what you have already checked — that context makes it much faster to trace where a specific message actually went.

If the problem started right after a change

Work out what changed immediately before mail stopped arriving — it narrows the search dramatically. A recent nameserver or DNS change points strongly at MX records; a recent password change points at every connected device needing the new password entered; a recent migration points at server settings on the receiving side rather than anything about the message itself. See migrating mailboxes to a new host and keeping email working during a migration if a move is the likely cause.

If it is affecting an entire team, not just you

When several people on the same domain report missing mail at the same time, the cause is almost certainly domain-wide — MX records, a blacklist affecting the domain, or a DNS change — rather than a coincidence of several individual mailbox problems happening together. Check the MX records and whether the domain is blacklisted first in this situation, ahead of checking individual mailbox settings.

Send a message to yourself from an external account as a clean test

Sending a test message to your own address from a completely separate account — a personal Gmail address, for instance — rather than from another mailbox on the same domain, rules out any shared configuration issue on your own domain affecting both the sender and the recipient in the test.

Keep a note of what you tried and when as you go through these checks — if it turns out you do need to contact support, that record saves repeating steps that have already ruled a cause out.