• Missing Email

If you'd like to ask us about emails that don't get through (especially ones which have "gone missing"), please read on: this explains what information we will find most helpful (i.e. the information we'll likely ask you for anyway), and what you can do to trace the problem yourself.

Missing Outgoing Email

If you (a Powernet customer) have sent a message and it hasn't got through:

• Check what mail server you sent the message to. Ideally you sent it to one of our servers (mail.powernet.co.uk or relay.avg.power.net.uk); if you didn't send it to one of our servers, it's possible that we may not be able to help you.

• Follow the instructions in the "General Tips" section.

Missing Incoming Email

If your (incoming) email is hosted with Powernet, and someone has sent you a message which didn't get through:

• Are you sure someone actually sent you some email? Please try to be specific about what's missing (a particular message) rather than "we normally receive at least a few emails and we haven't had any yet".
• Follow the instructions in the "General Tips" section.
• Track the progress of the missing message from beginning to end, to end to beginning. Did the message leave the sender's "outbox"? What does the sender have configured as their outgoing mail server? Ask the administrator of that server what happened to the message.

General Tips

• If the sender of the failed message got a "bounce" message, please send us the bounce message as an attachment (really: as an attachment. Yes, it matters). "Bounce" messages, when forwarded as attachments, contain lots of useful diagnostic information that will usually point us in the right direction very quickly.

• If there's an error message on screen, please tell us exactly what it says. Send us a screenshot if you like.

• Please tell us as many of the following, as accurately as you can:

  • the sender's email address (the MAIL FROM address)

  • the recipients' addresses (the RCPT TO addresses)

  • the date and time that the message was sent (if you're outside the UK, remember to include the time zone)
  • the subject line of the email
  • the sender's public IP address
  • which server the message was sent to, and, if you know it, the response message from our server

The Technical Bit

The way that almost all¹ mail servers work is that when some client (a desktop PC, or another server) sends a message to the mail server, a queue ID (sometimes called the transaction ID) is generated, and the sending client is told what that ID is. (The catch is that most desktop email software won't tell you what the ID was, unless you dig around and enable some extra debugging / diagnostic options).

If you talk to the administrator of that mail server and tell them the queue ID, they should be able to tell you all about the history of that message on the server. For example, if you send a message to the mail.powernet.co.uk server, it might say (once it has accepted the message):

250 OK id=1GA8MH-0004Hq-9Q

If you then contact our support desk and say that you'd like to track a message sent to mail.powernet.co.uk with ID 1GA8MH-0004Hq-9Q, then we'll be able to tell you exactly what happened to that message and when.

Often, what will happen to a message is that it will be sent on to another server. If this happens, most (sending) servers will then log the receiving server's name, IP address and response text (including the next server's queue ID). Given that information, you can then go "round the loop" again, and track the progress of that same message across the next server.

Eventually you'll usually be able to track down the fate of the fate of the message: maybe it was delivered to its destination, or maybe it bounced, or maybe it was discarded by some filtering policy.