Why is my email not being received?

I’m quite often asked by clients to help figure out what’s wrong when they send an email to someone and they’re told it hasn’t arrived.

There are a lot of possible reasons why that might happen, but it’s near impossible to give an answer unless you’ve got more information than just the recipient’s email address.

If you know the recipient’s mail server is up and running, then you might reasonably assume that your own mail server could be the problem.

A great place to find out the info you need is mail-tester.com

You simply head to the Mail Tester home page and you’ll see a one-time-use email address on the screen. All you need to do is copy that and paste it into your email software.

If the email you were trying to send isn’t privileged or otherwise confidential then it’s a good idea to send the actual email that was giving you trouble, because Mail Tester can analyse the contents and tell you if it is likely to be interpreted as spam.

But even if you don’t feel comfortable doing that, this website will still give you a head start on figuring out what’s wrong.

For this example, I’ve just pasted in an article from the BBC website.

All you need to do then is return to Mail Tester and click the Check My Score button.

The results page will tell you whether there’s a problem with the mail server you’re using or the contents of the email you’re sending. If all you see is green ticks, then you know there’s nothing wrong at your end.

And if there are any issues, there’s a plain English explanation along with the more technical stuff that your IT support people will want to know.

And there’s a handy link at the bottom, so if you do find a problem, you can share the results with someone who can help.