How-To: fix my Email Account
Are you having any of these problems with your email account?
- Won’t send
- Won’t receive
- Keeps asking for username or password
- Receive weird pop-up errors in Outlook
The ability to receive, download, and open emails and attachments in your email is crucial to your business. Emails can have attachments that can contain invoices, memos, and other important business documents. If you have ever had trouble sending an email you know how frustrating it can be. If you are having any of these problems, in this How-To I will explain how to diagnose these issues.
First turn off your computer and leave it off for at least 30 seconds. This will give the memory time to clear, and your computer time to reset. Simply doing a restart can help but a complete shut down and startup will fix some problems.
If you are still having problem it is best to check all of your settings. Check your settings and then check them again. Settings should be in ALL lower case. This includes your email account name and your POP and SMTP server names. If you are unsure about how to input these settings Apex IT Solutions offers customer support.
Pay close attention to these items:
- POP Server
- SMTP Server
- Account name
- Account Password
Next, check your virus scan software. Open up the software you use to check emails for viruses and double check the settings. Some software can be set to check outgoing email for viruses, and this could be causing you problems if you use email stationery, graphics, or attachments when you send emails. Try telling the software not to scan outgoing mail. Remember outgoing only.
What if your problem is that you can’t receive emails anymore. Well if you are not receiving any error messages and this happened it could be that your mailbox is full. Login to your control panel, click the email icon, click add/remove accounts and click “Show Disk Space Used”. This will show the quota and disk space used for each mailbox in your account. If you use webmail, delete old messages and empty your trash to free up some space. You can also increase your quota. When either of these conditions are met, email will start to get delivered again. Messages are not lost, but residing in queue waiting to be delivered.
If you can’t send emails maybe you don’t have your outgoing mail server set to authenticate email. First open your email program and go into the email account settings. Find the outgoing mail server settings and make sure it is checked to authenticate email. If it is not checked, check it and try sending mail again.
Lastly, if you are using Windows XP as your operating system you may need to download and install Service Pack 3. Click here to read about Service Pack 3 from Microsoft.
Although I have given lots of ways to look into your email issues they may not fix all of your computer related problems. If any of your problems continue always consult your IT support team to further diagnose the issue.