1 out of 3 email recipients is not receiving an email

Question

Level 1

0 points

1 out of 3 email recipients is not receiving an email

I have one user that is not receiving emails from a customer. The customer addresses the email to 3 users here. 2 users get the email just fine, but the 3rd user never receives it in their inbox. It isn't in their junk mailbox or trash, and there are no rules setup that might be affecting it. This user can email the customer just fine, but if the customer replies to that email it never shows up. And the customer is not receiving an undeliverable message.

What could cause this 1 user to not receive the email? They don't have a problem receiving emails from any other address. Is there some log in the mail server that I could look at for info?

Any suggestions would be appreciated.

Thanks.

MacMini Server, Mac OS X (10.6.6),  iPhone 3G 8GB

Posted on Sep 2, 2011 10:52 AM

Reply

Answer 1

Best reply

MrHoffman

Community+ 2024

Level 10

116,637 points

Sep 2, 2011 11:16 AM in response to Garner

The Server Admin tool has access the mail server logs.

Within Server Admin, select the Mac OS X Server box in use here, select the Mail server, and select the Logs item. Start with the SMTP server log in the view selection, but review the other logs while you are there.

For more details, launch Terminal.app and issue the command ls /var/log to locate the logs. To display the log, issue the command cat /var/log/mail.log to view the the full contents of the log.

You may well have performed this check, but also confirm that the user is enabled for mail within the Workgroup Manager settings for the user.

Reply

Answer 2

Garner Author

Level 1

0 points

Sep 2, 2011 1:13 PM in response to MrHoffman

Thanks for the suggestions MrHoffman.

I have checked logs and found a few with the sender's email address, but they only say that the messages were delivered.

The user that is not receiving the emails does have mail enabled within Workgroup Manager and can receive emails from all other customers. I sent her a few emails from my hotmail and yahoo mail accounts to test, and they came through to her Mail app just fine.

I'm going to see if she can call the customer and have the customer send her an email right then. And then have her notify me when it happens, so I can monitor the logs. I hope I can find some reason that she isn't receiving them and that no undelivered message is being sent to the customer.

Any other ideas? Anyone?

Thanks!

Reply

Answer 3

Sep 3, 2011 7:05 AM in response to Garner

If there are no associated log entries listed within the receiving SMTP server and if other remote users at other remote sites can send email to this target user, then the next likely source of errors or denials is within the sending mail server, or an errant user or domain specification in the remote mail client or related error.

Ask for log entries associated with the attempted SMTP send within the context of the remote mail server.

Also create a completely new user on your server, and ask for a test message send into that.

(And to ensure there are no local log entries related to this traffic, I'd likely grep the mail server logs for errors through all of the local logs, looking for any SMTP traffic to the target user. grep -r -i short-user /var/log will get you a list of the log entries associated with the user. Try this grep again with the test user - and pick a "weird" name string for that, to make the grep target easier - and see if there's any traffic associated with that.)

Reply