Email Troubleshooting: Track Delivery & Logs

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

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

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.

Here is an example of an accepted, successful email in the Track Delivery table:

Here is an example of a rejected, unsuccessful email in the Track Delivery table:

In this failed delivery, the result is listed as follows:

TLS_AES_256_GCM_SHA384:256 CV=yes : SMTP error from remote mail server after end of data: 550-5.7.1 [redacted IP] The IP you're using to send mail is not authorized to\n550-5.7.1 send email directly to our servers. Please use the SMTP relay at your\n550-5.7.1 service provider instead. For more information, go to\n550 5.7.1 https://support.google.com/mail/?p=NotAuthorizedError af79cd13be357-9158a37c902si2830046685a.43 - gsmtp

These error messages helps us understand why our email is not being delivered. In this case, A 550 5.7.1 error means Google's mail servers rejected the message because the sending IP address is not authorized to send email for that domain. This typically indicates the email was sent directly to the recipient's server instead of being routed through an approved SMTP relay, or that the domain's SPF record doesn't include the sending IP. To resolve this, we'd likely need to set up an SMTP relay.

Here is an example of a rejected, unsuccessful email in the Track Delivery table:

In this failed delivery, the result is listed as follows:

TLS_AES_256_GCM_SHA384: 256 CV=yes: SMTP error from remote mail server after pipelined MAIL FROM: <redacted email> SIZE=24158: 550 5.7.1 Unfortunately, messages from [redacted IP] weren't sent. Please contact your Internet service provider since part of their network is on our block list (S3140). You can also refer your provider to http://mail.live.com/mail/troubleshooting.aspx#errors. [Name=Protocol Filter Agent][AGT=PFA][Mxid=11BD4EACE481166E][SA2PEPF00001509.namprd04 prod.outlook.com 2026-05-01T17:28:39.483Z08DEA75672B84E42]

In this case, this error means Microsoft's mail servers rejected the message because the sending IP address is on their block list. This is typically caused by the IP having a poor sending reputation or appearing on a spam blacklist, which can happen on Shared Hosting servers. To troubleshoot, enter the sending IP into MXToolbox's blacklist checker to confirm which blacklists it appears on, then contact Reclaim Support with those results so they can submit a delisting request.

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.

Email Deliverability

This section allows you to manage your domain's email authentication records, specifically SPF, DKIM, and DMARC. These records help receiving mail servers verify that emails sent from your domain are legitimate, which is critical for ensuring your emails don't end up in spam folders or get rejected outright. If a user is having issues with emails not being delivered or being marked as spam, this is a good place to check that all three records are properly configured. cPanel will flag any records that are missing or invalid and give you the option to repair them automatically. We have more information in our Securing Email documentation.

Spam Filters and Apache SpamAssassin

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.

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.

Encryption

This section allows users to create or import a GPG (GNU Privacy Guard) key, which can be used to encrypt and decrypt emails for added security. This is an advanced feature primarily used when a user needs to ensure that email contents can only be read by the intended recipient. This is not commonly needed for general troubleshooting but may come up if a user is working in a security-sensitive environment.

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.