If an email has gone missing, the first job is to work out which way it was travelling. cPanel's Track Delivery tool shows what happened to messages sent from your account. For mail you're expecting to receive, a few quick checks usually find it.
Mail you sent: check Track Delivery
- Log in to cPanel and go to Email › Track Delivery.
- To find a particular message, enter the address you sent it to in the Recipient Email box and click Run Report.
- To see only problems, click Show Blocked & Failed.
- Read the Result column. This is the receiving server's own explanation of what happened.
| Status | What it means |
|---|---|
| Success | The recipient's mail server accepted the message. If they can't see it, ask them to check their spam or junk folder. |
| Deferred | A temporary problem, such as their server being busy or their mailbox being full. Our server will keep retrying. |
| Failed | Delivery failed, usually because the address or domain doesn't exist or was mistyped. |
| Rejected | The recipient's server refused the message, often because of its own strict filtering or a blacklist. |
| Filtered | Accepted by the recipient's server but sent to their spam folder. That's their filter, not ours. |
Our filtering doesn't block your outgoing mail. If messages are rejected or end up in spam, check that your domain's SPF, DKIM and DMARC records are in place. See how to set up SPF, DKIM and DMARC and test with our email checker.
Mail you're expecting to receive
- Check your Spam folder in webmail. Our filtering moves high-scoring messages there rather than deleting them. If your phone or desktop app doesn't show a Spam folder, it may be set up as POP3 rather than IMAP.
- Check the mailbox isn't full. In Email › Email Accounts, compare the usage against the quota. A full mailbox rejects new mail.
- Check your filters and forwarders. Look at Email › Email Filters, Email › Global Email Filters and Email › Forwarders for a rule that discards, redirects or files the message somewhere unexpected.
- Check you haven't blocked the sender in the MailScanner settings. See how spam filtering works and how to adjust it.
- Check your MX records point where your mail is hosted, using the email checker.
If none of that finds it, open a support ticket with the sender's address and the approximate time it was sent. Messages held before delivery are kept for a limited time, so the sooner you tell us, the better. Our blog post on using Track Delivery goes into more detail.
