Troubleshooting Email Delivery

If you are having difficulty getting email, we outline several steps you can check to determine where the source of the problem is. These are the same steps we follow to determine the source of a problem.

Item #1 - MX Records

Your MX Records must point to MX Guarddog servers, your personal MX records should be:

To view your current MX records we suggest you check MX Toolbox. It will perform a real-time query and get your public MX records.

If you do not see servers from ik2.com, your mail is not being directed to our servers. For instructions on setting up your MX Records see the MX Guarddog Servers page.

If you see ik2.com servers and other servers, your mail may be going to one of the other servers listed. You should only list servers from ik2.com - remove all others.

Item #2 - Email Addresses

You must define all email addresses with us, if an address is not known to us we will by default reject all incoming mail sent to unlisted addresses. An email address includes a full mailbox, aliases, distribution groups, forwarders etc.

If you can send an email to it - it is an email address - and needs to be listed with us on the email addresses page.

Item #3 - Queued Mail

If your server is offline, out of disk space, powered off, disconnected from the Internet etc. we will queue your mail for 7 days. Our servers will attempt delivery to your server every 15 minutes until you come back online.

You can see how many messages are in the delivery queue for your domain on the domain management page. Normally there should be no messages in the queue (high volume domains may see 1 or 2 at times).

Verify that you have the correct email sever listed on the Your Email Servers page, that is where we will attempt to deliver mail for your domain.

If you have a firewall or rules about who can connect to your server to deliver mail, ensure you are allowing access to our IP addresses.

Item #4 - Delivery Failures

If there is a problem delivering mail to your server, we will store the most recent error messages on the delivery failures page. We show the 50 most recent errors while attempting delivery to your server.

These are not errors with our servers, they are delivery failures that we detected when sending mail to your server. To view the exact error that was returned from your server, click on error summary.

Item #5 - Test Email Delivery

You can test email delivery for your domain from the Your Email Servers page. The email test will attempt to send a message to your server. If any error is received at the time of delivery it will be shown on the screen.

The testing tool is able to detect quite a few problems and will give you tips to go about correcting the problem if any are known to us.

Item #6 - Contact Us

If you have checked the above items for potential problems and you still have issues please contact us.