I can hear you screaming “Why am I not receiving emails?” at your computer.

And now that you’ve gotten that little modicum of catharsis, we can move on to solving the problem.

If you’re not getting emails you think you should be getting, there’s usually a pretty simple solution. But there’s not only one possible solution.

So I put together this five-step checklist you can follow to diagnose why you’re not receiving messages — and fix it, both immediately and going forward. I’ve focused on Gmail here, but much of the advice will be applicable to other email providers as well.

Plus, stick around — at the end of this article, we’ll also cover the best solution for making sure other people receive your emails.

Why Am I Not Receiving Emails: Table of Contents

• The 5-Step Checklist for Diagnosing Email Reception Issues
  • Step 1: Check your spam folder
  • Step 2: Check your other tabs
  • Step 3: Check your storage space
  • Step 4: Check your filters and blocked sender lists
  • Step 5: Diagnose a more complex problem
• How To Make Sure Everyone Always Receives Your Emails

The 5-Step Checklist for Diagnosing Email Receiving Issues

Here are the five steps you should follow to diagnose why you aren’t receiving messages.

Step 1: Check your spam folder

Spam filtering continues to get smarter — but it’s still nowhere close to perfect.

Lots of legitimate emails wind up in spam, and often that includes important emails. It can even include emails from senders you’ve engaged with in the past.

So as annoying as it is, you need to check your spam folder regularly. Especially because Gmail and others delete messages from spam after 30 days, whether you’ve seen them or not.

But it can be easy to forget to check your spam folder in Gmail, especially if you use their default folder setup.

How to fix the problem in Gmail

Click on the More link on the left sidebar in Gmail. That’s where you’ll find your Spam folder.

First off, check that folder for your missing messages.

If any of them are legitimate, click the “Not Spam” button at the top. That will move the email to your inbox. It will also make it more likely that sender’s future emails won’t go to spam for you — or for others.

You can also add senders to your contacts to ensure their emails make it to you every time. Mouse over their name inside and email, and click the add contacts button.

And finally, check out my article on hidden Gmail settings for a tip on how to make sure you remember to regularly check your Spam folder.

Step 2: Check your other tabs

By default, Gmail (and now Apple Mail too) divides up your emails into different tabs.

There’s your primary inbox, but Gmail also, by default, sorts your messages into tabs called Promotions (for things like newsletters and emails from brands) and Social (for social media updates). And Gmail takes its best guess as to which emails you receive belong in which tab.

A lot of people turn off the tabs — I know I do — but if you still have them, it’s entirely possible the emails you’re “missing” have just been miscategorized into one of those tabs.

How to fix the problem in Gmail

You can check your tabs by clicking between them at the top of your inbox. See if your missing emails are in one of those.

You can train Gmail by dragging an email from one tab to another. So if it’s been putting something in the Promotions folder that you’d rather have in your inbox, drag it there.

As I said before, while I can see the concept behind the tabs — in practice, not all of us want our inbox turned into multiple screens this way.

You can turn off the tabs by going into the Gmail settings, then clicking Customize on the Default inbox type.

Then you can select which tabs you want to use or or turn all of them off (except the Primary one).

Step 3: Check your storage space

There’s a storage limit on your mailbox. The limit is huge, and most of us won’t hit it.

But if you have an account you’ve been using for years (or decades at this point), or you get a lot of emails with attachments — you can actually plow through all the space Google or another email provider gives you.

Once you hit your storage limit, you’ll stop receiving messages.

How to fix the problem in Gmail

Google tends to give you warnings about storage space, and you can quickly reference your storage at the bottom of the screen.

The best quick solution for clearing up some space is to find your emails with large attachments and delete them. (Well… Google would say the best solution is to pay for more space. So I suppose the “best” way is relative.)

You can run a search for large attachments by searching for size:10mb in the Gmail search bar. That will surface every email with an attachment 10 megabytes or larger. 10 megabytes isn’t huge for a modern file, but it’s on the larger side for an email attachment.

Make sure you download any of the attachments you want to keep, then delete the emails.

After that, go to the Trash folder in Gmail and empty it to reclaim your space.

Step 4: Check your filters and blocked sender lists

If you’ve filtered or blocked a sender, their messages won’t reach your mailbox.

And it’s entirely possible to filter or block someone by accident.

(It’s also possible that an administrator has blocked addresses for all the accounts on your domain. We’ll cover that more advanced scenario in step five of this checklist.)

How to fix the problem in Gmail

You can see any senders you’ve blocked by going into the Gmail settings. Click See all settings.

Then go to the Filters and Blocked Addresses section.

You can see all your filters and blocks here.

Delete any that shouldn’t be there to unfilter/unblock those senders.

Step 5: Diagnose a more complex problem

Fortunately, one of the above steps should solve the vast majority of email reception problems.

But if none of those steps turned up your missing emails, you have to go to more advanced troubleshooting.

Here are some of the other reasons why you might not be receiving emails and what to do about them.

The sender is having deliverability problems

The good news: The most likely answer for why you’re not receiving emails is… not your fault.

The bad news: You’ll have to rely on someone else to fix the problem.

When you’re not receiving someone’s emails, and none of the basic troubleshooting steps on this checklist work — it’s usually the sender.

They could be having deliverability issues for any number of reasons. It’s best to reach out to them and let them know.

Also, consider having them try to email you at an email address on a different provider. (For instance, register for a free Yahoo or Proton Mail account and see if you receive their emails there.)

Your account administrator has blocked emails

If you’re on a Google Workspace account for your company, it’s possible the account administrator has blocked some senders at the organization level. There’s nothing you can do to circumvent that block.

If this could potentially be the case, you can talk to the administrator about re-evaluating the block on that sender.

You’ve unsubscribed from a sender

It’s possible you unsubscribed from a sender — and maybe even forgot or didn’t realize it. There are one-click unsubscribe options these days that can make accidental unsubscribes more common.

Your remedies here are to re-subscribe to the sender’s list — or contact them to see if you are on their unsubscribe list and they could remove you.

You’ve been been blocked by a sender

There’s also a chance you’ve been blocked by a sender.

This can happen if they’ve bounced a message to you. Often bounces aren’t your fault — a bounce could happen if there was something temporarily down at your email provider or even a DNS issue.

You also wouldn’t know that you’re on their blocked list. However, you could reach out to ask them to check and remove you.

If you’re not receiving any emails, there could be DNS issues

If you’re not receiving ALL your emails, there’s probably a fundamental issue happening somewhere in your account setup.

For individual Google Workspace users, I recommend checking the DNS settings at your domain name provider to make sure the Gmail MX records are all still in place. (I recommend this because it happened to me a few months ago.)

If you’re still having problems after all this…

If all else fails, try using AI for help

You’ve reached the point where none of the obvious solutions are fixing the problem.

Before you go pay an expert to help you, I suggest trying ChatGPT or another AI tool. Tell it your problem, go through the troubleshooting steps you’ve tried, and ask it to help you work through what’s going on.

And then, if that fails… you’ll need to go to the pros.

How To Make Sure Everyone Always Receives Your Emails

In this checklist, we’ve covered all the possibilities for why you’re not receiving emails.

But how can you make sure everyone receives the emails YOU send?

If you send any types of email campaigns — from sales outreach to newsletters to mail merge messages — GMass is a great solution.

GMass transforms Gmail into an email sending platform. You can send any type of campaign right from your Gmail account.

And with GMass’s incredible suite of deliverability tools, you’ll know your messages are getting to people’s inboxes where they belong.

You can try out GMass for free, with no credit card required, by downloading the Chrome extension.

See why 400,000 people rely on GMass (and give it an average of 4.8 out of 5 stars) to make sure everyone on their list is receiving their emails.