General email troubleshooting [1/2]

This article will help you identify what is the reason why you are not able to send or receive emails from your mail server.

There is no difference in the troubleshooting technique on issues with receiving and sending emails.

First I will assume you already know what your servers hostnames are. For example we have as incoming mailserver mail.yourdomain.com and for outgoing mailserver we have smtp.yourdomain.com.

First thing to check is if the host resolves to the proper server IP address.

Open command prompt terminal. If you do not know how to do that please click here HERE.

Then type:

If it starts replying then you have connectivity. If it returns "Ping request could not find host ..." then you most likely have DNS problem. You can try to ping the IP address itself to see if that really is the case.

Lets say that you had no problems with the above or if you had , they have been resolved.

Actually only one thing you can do to check for connectivity on the specified port. For that we will use the telnet program. Again in command prompt we type: