About 90% of our support calls are related to email. Usually the call starts with “My email doesn’t work”! The following is a fun article which will solve a lot of these issues for you, hopefully saving some time.

Before you do anything, perhaps obviously, the very first step to troubleshooting is to ensure that your internet connection is working. Without an internet connection, you will not be able to receive email or view your website (or any website for that matter).

Check to see if you are able to go to www.google.com. Next step is to enter in your domain name here. If your internet connection is not working, contact your internet service provider (ISP) such as BigPond, iiNet, Internode etc.

AUTHENTICATION FAILURE
I know computers can be annoying and cryptic at times, but surprisingly, the error message that Outlook (or the other various email programs – Thunderbird, Mail, Entourage etc) provides, actually usually tells you exactly what the problem is.

Example: You hit send/receive but a popup appears that says “Enter Network Password:” you enter it in your password and it appears again and again and again and so out of frustration you finally hit “cancel” only to receive this error:

Your email rejected your login. Verify your user name and password in your account properties. Under Tools, click Email accounts…

Here’s a question for the class. What do you think that error message means?… CORRECT! You’ve either entered in your password incorrectly or you’re not using the entire email address as the username.

REMEDY: Enter in the correct password. If you don’t recall your password, you can always reset it in your hosting account Control Panel (cPanel). “Authentication failure” is just a fancy pants way of saying “login incorrect”.

FIREWALL BLOCK
Quickest way to determine if you have a firewall block is to go to your website. If there is a firewall block, it will read something like this:

Your connection to this server has been blocked in the firewall.
This is because someone or something at your site appears to be trying to break into our server (password guessing) or is using excessive resources (POP every minute).
You need to contact your hosting provider for further information (scode: 4).
Your blocked IP address is ’000.00.000.000′.

If you are blocked, you will not be able to see your website and not be able to receive email.

REMEDY: Restart your router/modem. Most ISPs allocate dynamic IPs which means that when you restart your router, you will get a new (and consequently unblocked) IP address.

If that doesn’t work, submit a support ticket and copy/paste the entire message including the IP address into the email. Be sure to include your domain name so we know who you are!

Oh, and stop entering in the same password over and over again. The server will not magically decide that the password is correct!

A common cause for a firewall block is incorrectly entering in your password too many times (5 times in a 15 min time period) and/or your email program (eg Outlook) checking for email (send/receive) more than 60 times per hour.

A firewall block does not affect your clients from sending you emails or viewing your website. As the block is applied by the IP address (of your computer). Your customers will have a different IP address than you. You will be able to retrieve your email once the firewall block has been removed.

DOMAIN EXPIRED
If your domain has expired, you will be unable to see your website or receive emails. You can check it by going to your website. If you see something like this:

This domain name expired on (date).

then your domain has expired. You can also check by entering in your domain name here.

REMEDY: Login to the billing system and under My Domains select your domain, and click the “Renew Domain” button.

Keep checking back as there are more troubleshooting remedies to come. Our aim is to make this web/email business as easy as possible for you to use!

Comments are closed.