Your email worked yesterday. Why not today?

Hardly a week goes by without a client contacting us about email. Mail from outside does not arrive, messages they send never reach the other side, or mail turns up hours late. Very often nothing changed on the client's side. What changed is the rest of the email world. Over the past two years Google, Yahoo, and Microsoft have all tightened the rules on what they accept, and Google has switched off features many businesses relied on. Setups that worked for years are now quietly failing.

Below are the problems we see most often, grouped by what you will notice, with a plain-language explanation of what is usually behind each one.

“People say they sent me email, but I never got it”

1. Your mail is still going to the old server – every domain has an MX record, which tells the world where to deliver its email. After a hosting move, a new website, or a change of DNS provider, this record is easily left pointing at the old server, or pointing nowhere at all. The website works perfectly, so nobody suspects anything until clients start phoning.

2. Your mailbox is full – once a mailbox reaches its storage limit, new mail bounces back to the sender. The sender sees an error message. You see nothing.

3. Your domain has expired – when the domain registration lapses, the website and the email stop together. This is one of the reasons we insist that the domain is always registered in the client's own name, so the renewal notices go to you.

4. Real mail is caught in a spam filter – most mail servers have a filter that quarantines suspicious messages. Sometimes it is too eager and holds back legitimate mail, without telling anyone.

5. Forwarding to Gmail no longer works reliably – many businesses forward their domain address to a Gmail account. A forwarded message looks to Gmail as if it was sent by your server on someone else's behalf, which fails the security checks described below. Gmail then sends it to spam or rejects it outright.

6. Gmail has stopped collecting your business mail – Gmail used to offer a “Check mail from other accounts” feature, which pulled mail from your domain mailbox into Gmail. Google has retired this feature, along with Gmailify, during 2026. If your business mail arrived in Gmail this way, it may simply have stopped arriving there, while it piles up unread on your mail server.

“My emails are not arriving” or “they land in spam”

When you send an email, the receiving server asks three questions: Is this server allowed to send mail for this domain? Was the message changed on the way? And what does the domain owner want done with mail that fails these tests? Three DNS records answer these questions: SPF, DKIM, and DMARC. In 2024 Google and Yahoo started enforcing them, and Microsoft followed in May 2025 for Outlook.com and Hotmail addresses. Mail that cannot answer all three questions is far more likely to land in spam, or to be rejected.

1. SPF is missing or broken – SPF is the list of servers allowed to send mail for your domain. We regularly find two SPF records where there may only be one, records that run past the limit of ten lookups, or records that leave out a service, such as the accounting software that emails your invoices or the newsletter service you use.

2. There is no DKIM signature – DKIM adds a digital signature to every message, proving that it came from you and was not altered. After a migration, the signing key is often never published, so the signature fails.

3. DMARC is missing or does not match – DMARC tells receiving servers what to do when SPF or DKIM fails, and it requires the “From” address to match the domain that passed the check. A missing or badly set DMARC record is now one of the most common reasons for mail landing in spam.

4. Your server is on a blacklist – on shared hosting, many businesses send mail from the same server. If one of them sends spam, the whole server can be blacklisted, and your mail suffers for someone else's behaviour.

5. Your account has been compromised – if someone has your password, they may be using your mailbox to send spam. Apart from the obvious damage, this quickly gets your domain blacklisted.

6. Your website's contact form does not send properly – many contact forms send their messages without logging in to a mail server. Modern mail servers treat this as suspicious, so enquiries from your website disappear without anyone knowing.

“My email takes hours to arrive”

1. Greylisting – some mail servers deliberately reject the first message from an unknown sender and wait for it to be sent again. Real servers retry and spammers usually do not, but the retry can take anything from minutes to hours.

2. Failed security checks cause retries – when SPF, DKIM, or DMARC is not quite right, the receiving server may temporarily refuse the message. The sending server keeps trying, and the mail eventually arrives, late.

3. DNS changes are still spreading – after a hosting move, it can take up to 48 hours for the whole internet to learn the new address of your mail server. During that time some mail goes to the old server and some to the new one.

4. Outlook only checks occasionally – Outlook checks for new mail on a schedule. If that interval is long, or if one of your accounts keeps failing, the whole send/receive cycle stalls and all your accounts appear slow.

5. The new Outlook works differently – the new Outlook for Windows does not connect to your mail server directly. It connects through Microsoft's cloud, which then collects your mail for you. Some mail servers throttle or block these connections, which shows up as delays or connection errors that never happened in the classic Outlook.

Running Gmail and your business email in the same Outlook

This combination causes more trouble than almost anything else we see, and it has become worse recently.

1. Google no longer accepts a plain password – mail programs must now sign in to Gmail through Google's own login screen, or use a special app password. Older setups simply stop working, and Outlook keeps asking for a password that is, as far as you know, correct.

2. Gmail's folders confuse Outlook – Gmail uses labels and an “All Mail” folder, so Outlook downloads many messages twice. The data files grow very large, synchronising becomes slow, and a stuck Gmail account can hold up your business account as well.

3. Mail goes out from the wrong account – if Gmail is the default account, your replies to clients can go out from the Gmail address. Worse, business mail can be sent through Google's servers while it claims to come from your domain, which fails the SPF and DMARC checks and lands in spam.

4. Classic Outlook and new Outlook behave differently – advice you find online often does not match what you see on your screen, because it was written for the other version.

5. The Outlook profile becomes corrupted – after enough of these problems, the Outlook data files can become damaged. Often the only reliable fix is a fresh Outlook profile.

Our advice is simple: keep your business email and your private email apart. Use your domain address for business, in its own program or profile, and read private Gmail somewhere else. We explain why your business should not run on a free address in Why You Need a Domain-Based Email Address.

Other setup problems we come across

1. POP instead of IMAP – with POP, mail is downloaded to one device and removed from the server. Your phone and your laptop show different mail, and when that laptop is stolen or breaks, the mail is gone. IMAP keeps everything on the server and in sync on all your devices.

2. Wrong server settings – an incorrect port, encryption setting, or a missing tick next to “My outgoing server requires authentication” is enough to stop mail from sending.

3. A password changed in one place only – if you change your email password on your laptop but not on your phone, the phone keeps trying the old password. After enough failed attempts, the server may block the account for everyone.

4. Nobody knows where the DNS is managed – to fix most of the problems above, someone needs access to the domain's DNS settings. When nobody knows who registered the domain or where it is managed, a ten-minute fix turns into a week of detective work.

Our Email Health Check

Most email problems look the same from the outside: mail does not arrive. Finding the real cause takes the right tools and a methodical approach, and fixing it usually means correcting a handful of records or settings in the right place. Our Email Health Check covers the following:

1. We check your DNS records – we confirm that your MX, SPF, DKIM, and DMARC records exist, are correct, and do not contradict each other.

2. We test your mail server against blacklists – we check that your server is not listed on the major spam blacklists, and that it identifies itself correctly to other servers.

3. We check your mail server itself – some problems cannot be seen from the outside. A server can have perfect DNS records and still send mail without a DKIM signature, so we also look at the settings in your hosting control panel.

4. We fix what we find – we correct the records where your DNS is actually managed, which is not always where your hosting is.

5. We prove that it works – we send a test message to a major mail provider and read the results in the message headers. You receive confirmation that SPF, DKIM, and DMARC all pass.

Where needed, we can also set up Outlook properly on your computers and phones, move you from POP to IMAP, and separate your business email from your private Gmail.

We ran the test on ourselves first

Before offering this service, we put our own address, contact@andriesoberholzer.com, through exactly the same procedure. Our DNS records looked fine at first glance, yet the check found that DKIM signing had been switched off on our mail server, so our outgoing mail had no digital signature at all. Nothing appeared to be wrong, which is exactly why problems like this go unnoticed for months. After the fix, our test message passed SPF, DKIM, and DMARC with flying colours and went straight to the recipient's inbox.

If it can happen to a web developer, it can happen to anyone. If your email is giving you trouble, or you simply want peace of mind, contact us to book an Email Health Check, or call us on 084 531 8046.