We know how important emails are – it's absolutely annoying when they don’t come through. You’re not alone; we'd also freak out. It’s like unexpected load shedding in South Africa. This article gives you steps to help diagnose and fix email deliverability issues.

1. Check your DNS settings

Most email issues occur when you first set up your web hosting. We recommend that you first check whether your name servers are up to date.

Step 1: Navigate to intodns.com, enter your domain name and click on the Report button.  This is a free service and updates in real-time.

Step 2: Look at the report and see if you can spot any red boxes (errors). (Yellow boxes (warnings) are fine in some cases).

If you spot any red boxes, you will need to address them immediately by fixing the error. For example, if you have a missing DNS entry, please fill it in or open a support ticket and we will assist you with this. If you have a missing WWW A record, the email will not work. If you’re using our Jesede name servers the MX records will be automatically created.

2. Check the webmail client

If you are not receiving emails on your phone, laptop, or other email clients, check if the emails are routing to the server. These steps only apply if you are hosting your emails with us at Jesede. They will not work for third-party providers such as Gmail.

Step 1: Navigate and login to your domain’s webmail by typing your domain followed by “/webmail”. For example, if your domain name is yourdomain.co.za, your webmail will be on: https://yourdomain.co.za/webmail

Step 2: Select any webmail client (Horde or Roundcube) and proceed to your inbox. In this example, we selected Roundcube.

Step 3: Check your inbox. If you see that your emails are getting in the webmail client, then your emails are working fine. However, there may be an issue with your email client (on your phone or computer). To fix this, you need to double-check your mail server, ports, username, and password.

Step 4: To get your server, ports, and username, click on Webmail home.

Step 5: Select the device you want to receive the settings for.

Step 6: Type in an email address that you want the email setup instructions to be sent to and press the send button. Make sure you can access this email address.

Step 7: Follow the instructions on the email you receive. 

3. Track Delivery in cPanel

If you are not receiving emails on your phone, laptop, or other email clients, check if the emails are routing to the server by tracking delivery inside cPanel. These steps only apply if you are hosting your emails with us at Jesede. They will not work for third-party providers such as Gmail.

Step 1: Login to cPanel and navigate to Track delivery. Read this article if you don’t know how to login to cPanel.

Step 2: Make sure all the filters are checked and look at the result column to see if there are any server-side errors. In the example below, there was an issue with mail delivery to test@web.co.za because, at the time of sending, the mailbox did not exist.

Step 3: Take the appropriate action or reach out to our support department by creating a ticket.

4. How to Fix your Email

Once you track down what’s going on you can then begin taking necessary actions to repair it.  The above three items explain how to see the errors, but if you need help resolving them feel free to reach out to our team and it would be our pleasure to assist!

If you’re using a third-party provider such as Gmail we may be limited to the support we can provide, but we can at least check and ensure your MX records are properly set.