Are you unable to receive any emails at all? Below, we have troubleshooting tips for the most common causes of this issue.
- Check our operational status
- Check if your account is overdue
- Check for typos in the email address
- Check if your mail storage is full
- Check your mail rules
- Check your custom domain settings
- Check your pinned emails
Check our operational status
If we are experiencing an issue at our end, we will post to our status dashboard with details and updates as we have them. If there is no information on this page, the problem may exist elsewhere.
Check if your account is overdue
If your account's subscription is overdue, receiving mail could be disabled for your account. Please go to your Settings → Billing & Plan screen to check that your subscription is not overdue.
Check for typos in the email address
Verify that the sender is sending the message to the right email address. Emails will not be delivered to your account if the email address typed in is incorrect.
Check if your mail storage is full
If your mailbox storage is over quota, emails sent to your account will bounce. You can check your storage usage from the bottom of the folder list in your mailbox screen. If you find your account over quota, you may want to consider upgrading your account plan.
Emails in your Trash folder also count towards your quota, so you may also delete the emails in your Trash folder to free up some space for your account. To do this, open your Trash folder, select the emails you wish to delete, and click the Delete permanently button.
If you need to see which folders use the most storage quota, go to Settings → Folders in your account. You can permanently delete emails from any folder using the keyboard shortcut %.
Check your mail rules
Our Settings → Mail rules screen can help you keep your mailbox organized. If it isn’t used correctly, it can cause accidental deletion or misplacement of emails either in your spam folder or in a custom folder.
Check your Trash folder and blocked senders list
Mail sent from blocked senders and domains will automatically be moved to your Trash folder, so make sure that the sender’s address or domain is not present in the Settings → Mail rules → Blocked senders screen. If you find the sender’s address or domain in the list, you can unblock the sender using the Unblock button.
Check your spam settings
Emails incorrectly detected as spam will end up in your Spam folder. Please check your spam folder to make sure the email isn’t present in it. If the email is found in the spam folder, click the Not spam button so that the email is learned as not spam (the message will be moved to your Inbox).
In some scenarios, the emails might get deleted if your spam protection level is set to Aggressive or Custom. You can find the spam protection level set for your account in the Settings → Mail rules → Spam protection screen. If you’ve set your spam protection level to Aggressive and you’re missing emails, please try changing it to Standard and request an email from the sender again.
Check address actions
Address actions are applied to all messages sent to a particular email address before any user rules are applied. You may want to check if you have set any specific address action for the email address.
To see the specific addresses that are set with a particular address action, go to the Settings → Mail rules screen and click the View button under the Address actions section. (If you do not have any address actions set, this section will not appear on the screen.)
Check your rules
Rules can be used to automatically perform actions on messages that are sent to your mailbox, such as moving certain messages into a folder. You may need to review the rules that you’ve created to ensure that your messages are not accidentally getting moved to a different folder or deleted.
Check your custom domain settings
If you have a custom domain and you are not receiving emails at your custom domain address, you'll want to make sure that the domain's DNS is set up correctly. Incorrect DNS settings can cause emails to bounce.
Check if the custom domain is active
Click the Recheck DNS button on the Settings → Domains screen to check the current status of your domain.
If your domain was working previously and is suddenly inactive, this could mean that a recent DNS change has affected your MX records, or there is some other issue with your domain registrar, such as a lapsed payment.
Please check that all payments are up to date with your domain registrar and that they are not currently experiencing any issues. Make sure that your only MX records are:
-
in1-smtp.messagingengine.com(first, priority = 10) -
in2-smtp.messagingengine.com(second, priority = 20)
Ensure that the subdomain is active
If you are expecting emails to arrive to your subdomain address(e.g., anything@user.domain.tld), you can check the status of the subdomain by going to the Settings → Domains screen and clicking the Edit button for the domain. If you see the message Email for subdomains of domain.tld is not currently handled by Fastmail, it means that emails addressed to addresses at this subdomain will not be received. For more information on how to set up MX records to receive emails at your subdomain, please see our Manual DNS configuration help page.
Check if there is a CNAME record for the root domain
Never set a CNAME record for your top-level domain, as this will break email delivery for the domain.
Check your pinned emails
If you have too many pinned emails at the top of your mailbox, this can make it look like you aren’t receiving mail.
You should be able to see new messages by continuing to scroll past the pinned emails. You can also click the sorting menu above your messages and change your sorting option to Sort pinned with the rest.
If you pinned a large number of emails by mistake, you can unpin them by selecting the message, clicking the More button, and clicking Unpin.