My email is not arriving

Email problems split cleanly in two, and the fix is different for each. Work out which one you have before changing anything.

Which half is broken?

• You are not RECEIVING mail - people send to you and nothing arrives.
• You are not SENDING mail - what you send does not reach people, or lands in spam.

If you are not receiving

Almost always DNS. Receiving mail requires an MX record pointing at the right mail servers.

The most common cause is a nameserver change: when a domain moves, its DNS records are recreated at the new provider, and if the MX records were not carried across, mail stops arriving from that moment. It does not bounce loudly, either - it usually just goes somewhere else quietly.

Check the domain's DNS in your dashboard for an MX record. If there is none, that is your answer.

If you are not sending

Two likely causes, in order:

SPF and DKIM. These are DNS records that tell the receiving server your mail is genuine. Without them a lot of providers will refuse the message or file it as spam. Neither is optional in practice any more.

Sending from the wrong place. A contact form that sends from you@yourdomain.com while the server is not authorised to send for that domain will fail authentication every time, even though the address is really yours.

Checking whether it is you or them

Send a message to an address on a different provider - a Gmail address if your problem is with Outlook, or the reverse. If that arrives, the problem is specific to one recipient's provider rather than to your domain, and the fix is usually SPF or DKIM.

What to include in a ticket

The exact bounce message, if you have one. Bounce text is precise and names the real reason; "my email is not working" does not. Also tell us whether the address you are sending to is inside or outside your own domain - internal-only failures point somewhere quite different.