Email bouncing or missing? Five checks before you call anyone

Some email problems are a typo. Some are a domain problem. These five checks tell you which one you have, in about ten minutes.

1. Read the bounce message. Look for the line that starts with a number, such as 550. A "mailbox not found" means the address is wrong. A message naming "policy", "spam" or "authentication" means the receiver rejected your domain.

2. Send to a different provider. Try one address at Gmail and one at Outlook. If one accepts and the other rejects, the problem sits with how your domain looks to that receiver.

3. Check your own spam folder. Send a message from another account to yours. If it lands in spam, mail servers do not trust that sender either.

4. Ask what changed. A new invoicing tool, a new website form, a move to a different email provider. Problems tend to start within a few days of a change.

5. Run a domain check. Our free scan reads your domain's email records, known as SPF, DKIM and DMARC, and gives a score out of 10, with the missing pieces listed. A score of 10 means the domain is fine and the problem is somewhere else, usually step 1 or 2.

If the score is lower

Then the records are the cause, and fixing them is the cure. Domain Security is $25 a month per domain, with a one-time $199 fix if the scan finds problems. A domain at 10 pays no fix fee. No contract.

If you would rather hand it off

The same domain protection comes with ♠ CORE at $49 per seat per month, together with email filtering, backup, device protection, identity monitoring and patching. Start with the scan either way.

Run the free scan on your domain →