I'm not receiving an email I was expecting

There are times when you will be expecting an email from a specific address that you do not receive. This can happen due to different reasons, whether it be from the sending side, the receiving side, or even the route in between. While you cannot do anything directly with the sending side or the route in between, there are things you can check on your hosting side to either find the issue or at least rule it out so the sender can check their side. This article assumes you are using email hosted at Web Hosting Hub.

Perform a Whois lookup

The WHOIS database is a public database that contains details about a domain, such as who it belongs to, and when it was last modified. When you lookup your Whois, the main thing you want to check for is the expiration date, to ensure it has not expired. If it has expired, you must renew the domain with your registrar, and point back to our Nameservers. Then within 24 hours it will propagate back to us, and restore functionality.

Send yourself a test message

An important test is to ensure your email account is receiving mail in general. The quickest way to check this is to send yourself a test email. Although you can send it from the same email account you want to receive it, we suggest that you send it from an external mail service, such as Gmail, Hotmail, or Yahoo, if you have one. If you do not receive the test message, the sending account should receive a message known as a bounceback. The bounceback email will have more information as to why the original message did not get through. From here you can check the message against our list of common reasons, or also contact our Live Support team so they can check into the issue further. If you do not receive a bounceback email message, you will want to contact our Live Support team immediately.

IP BlackList Check

If you are certain your email account is receiving properly, it is time to go to the next test. One of the most common reasons an email does not get delivered is due to the sending server IP address appearing on a blacklist. An email blacklist is a constantly changing list that adds and removes mail servers based on their 'reputation', which is set based on the amount of spam it sends out. It is common for email servers to get blacklisted and removed regularly from the various spam filtering services. Either you or the sender can check the sending mail IP address to see if it is blocked by using our Online BlackList Checker. If the sender's IP address is blacklisted by one or more of the services, either they or their host will need to contact the service to get the IP address removed.

Check your MX Records

Another reason, although less common, could be that the MX records are incorrect. You can check your MX records via the cPanel. If you see no MX records listed at the bottom of the screen, there should be a message that they will default to the A record. This should be sufficient, however you can also add a new record using the form on the page. Keep the priority at 0 and set the destination field to your domain name (eg: example.com). This will create a new MX record and should act as the default.

Contact Live Support

If your MX records are good, you have received your test email and/or other email from other sources, and checked the IP address for blacklisting, there is one other thing to check on the WebHosting Hub side. This will require you to contact our Live Support team so they can check into the email logs and see if a delivery attempt to your hosting server was made. Even if the email is rejected, it will have a record of the attempt. Be sure to include information such as the sender's name and/or email address, time it was sent, and subject header. If our support technicians see no delivery attempt was made, it means the email was lost before it had a chance to contact our servers. In this case, the sending side will need to begin troubleshooting to see what the issue may be.