Troubleshooting email can be a difficult and tedious task, and we’re here to make this a smooth process to allow for the least amount of headaches as possible. Below are tools you can use that will allow you to be more concise in time spent going over these issues.
Goals for Troubleshooting:
- Look for/ Request IP address. Is it blocked?
- Request User’s email client settings
- Search for error messages
- Gathering as much information as possible using the tools below
Features & Tools in cPanel
Email Accounts
Where you can create email addresses, view existing ones, and access webmail on the server. If you can view certain emails from within the webmail client but the user can’t receive email on their local client, this is usually an issue with their Email Configuration Settings.
Forwarders
This allows you to send a copy of any incoming email from one address to another so that you only have one inbox to check. You can also use this section to forward all email accounts from one domain to another. If forwarders aren’t set up properly, this may be a reason for why email isn’t being relayed to the expected location.
Email Routing
If you’re planning on using Google suite and another third-party mail client, you MUST set your email routing settings to *Remote Mail Exchanger *.
Autoresponders
Set up automated emails to go out if your inbox receives mail. These are your ‘Out of Office’, etc. responses.
Default Address Maintenance
This feature will “catch” emails that are sent to an invalid email address for your domain. So for instance, if someone sends an email to info@labrumfield.com, I ordinarily wouldn’t receive it because I don’t have that email address set up. This feature allows you to say, “If anyone sends mail to an email address with my domain name in it, regardless if it’s been set up or not, forward it here.”
Reclaim Hosting’s default setting is to discard these emails since they’re generally loaded with spam. So if a user has this setting turned on and then complains of an excess of spam, this could likely be the smoking gun.
Mailing List
We’ve found that this feature doesn’t work well at all, so we don’t directly support this. Instead, we recommend using GNU Mailman or Google Groups.
Track Delivery & Apache SpamAssassin
This is our go-to, one-stop-shop for troubleshooting. This is where we as admins or the user can go to see what happened on the server. You can see successful email activity, failed sent emails, and deferred emails (meaning: emails are put on a queue to retry sending again). Timestamps, spam score ratings*, and event details (sender IP, user, router, etc.) are also available as well.
- Apache SpamAssassin is turned off by default, but can be enabled within the icon. It rates all incoming mail and filters what it defines as spam. SpamAssassin defines what spam is by rating it based on a set up specified rules. Everything over a 5+ rating is sent to the spam folder. You can modify the rating number and auto-delete spam under the Apache spam assassin icon.
Global Email Filters
We’ve received tickets in the past where folks had spam coming through so the users wanted to set a filter to automatically delete specific emails. cPanel has guides on this that can be found here.
Authentication & Calendar
Honestly, Reclaim Hosting isn’t all too familiar with this feature, but cPanel has written guides on setting it up here. There are so many better alternatives for managing contacts and calendars, so we rarely, if any at all, get requests for folks wanting to use their cPanel for this.
Boxtrapper
This is not that useful in our opinion. BoxTrapper “protects” you from spam by requiring all email senders not on your Whitelist confirm their identity before you can receive their mail. While that sounds great in theory, confirmation emails with a ‘noreply@’ email address would never make it to your inbox since there’s no one on the other end managing the address. This will also double your email incoming/outgoing quota.
Email disk usage
It allows you to view which email folders (inbox, spam, trash, etc.) are taking up the most space and gives you the option to delete mail in bulk.