gmail is something that most of us use every day, most of the time without any problem. Unfortunately, some users encounter the error of not receiving emails. There are several things you can try to start receiving your emails again.
You may get this error on your phone, computer or even your tablet, so we will write solutions for all these situations.
general troubleshooting
First, let’s start by reviewing some key troubleshooting practices.
check google servers
although rare, google servers go down for maintenance or unplanned problems. you can check the status of google workspace and see if gmail is currently down or was recently down. If Google’s servers were temporarily down, then perhaps your email was not handled correctly. in that case, we recommend that you ask your sender to resend the email to you.
send yourself a test email
Another simple troubleshooting test you can try is to send yourself an email. Try sending yourself two emails, one from a gmail account and one from another email service like yahoo or outlook. if you can receive emails from yourself, the emails you don’t receive are probably an isolated case.
check your spam folder
Don’t forget to check your spam folder! Google automatically filters some emails as spam, so the email you expect may be there. It’s in the left corner of the screen when you open the gmail website or app. If your antivirus has an email filtering feature, the email you were expecting is probably here or in the trash.
check your trash
Similarly, you’ll want to check your trash. maybe you misclicked or accidentally deleted an email she was expecting. again, this is especially common for antivirus software to delete emails it thinks are viruses.
go to all emails
Finally, there is an all mail option on the left side of the screen that shows all emails related to your account. If you can’t find the email you’re waiting for in the trash or spam, then maybe the all mail tab has it. this is also where archived emails are stored. Since all it takes is a simple swipe left or right to archive your email, you may have accidentally sent it there.
update the gmail app
You should always make sure your applications are up to date. Please update your gmail app via app store or google play store. An outdated gmail app can cause sync errors and other issues that cause you to lose some of your emails.
use another browser
If you still haven’t found your email, try using a different browser. gmail is only officially supported in four browsers, so opening it in any of them should produce the best results.
you can open your gmail in:
- google chrome
- firefox
- safari
- microsoft edge
These browsers must have cookies and javascript enabled.
Similarly, if you are using the gmail app on your phone, try opening gmail in your phone’s browser. Sometimes the gmail app can have problems, especially when it comes to syncing and receiving emails in real time.
try gmail on your computer
For those of you on your phones and tablets, you’ll want to try gmail on a computer. Unlike your phone, where your app may be out of date, your computer browsers are always up to date. this makes it more reliable, especially for problems like this where a network or connectivity error might be your problem.
Log out and log back in to your account
Signing out of your gmail account and logging back in can help fix the problem by forcibly syncing your gmail account with google servers. this should display the emails that were missing from your device.
check your gmail account storage
Unfortunately, unlimited storage is not free. gmail has a storage limit, and once you reach it, you will stop receiving messages. You can easily check your account storage by opening your google drive. Your storage space (should be 15GB by default for free users) will be displayed on the right side of your screen. if your storage is full, you will need to delete files from your google drive or the emails in your trash to delete this.
gmail doesn’t automatically delete your emails when you throw them in the trash. google keeps it for you for 30 days before removing it themselves. however, it takes up space while it’s in the trash, so we’ll have to delete them permanently. this is how you can completely delete or recover deleted emails in gmail.
double check your gmail filter settings
Filtering your emails is often a must, especially if you start getting random spam emails from bots and advertisers. Unfortunately, the email you were expecting to receive may also have been filtered.
The gmail mobile app settings are limited, so it’s best to use your computer for this. If you don’t have a computer, you can open Gmail in your phone’s browser app. just make sure to check the “show desktop version” option in your browser app.
on your pc:
- open your gmail account and click the gear icon in the top right corner of your screen to go to your settings.
- find and click “view all settings “.
- go to “filters and blocked addresses”.
- Find the email addresses you’ve blocked or created filters for. unblock or unfilter the email address you want to receive emails from.
If you unblocked or unfiltered any email addresses, we recommend that you ask them to resend the email to you. your gmail account should now receive the email with no problem.
turn off gmail email forwarding
Email forwarding is a useful option for users who switch to a different email address. this causes emails sent to your email to be forwarded to your new email. if this was triggered by some mistake then your email will not receive anything new.
For those of you still on the gmail setup from the previous method, skip to step 3.
- open the gmail website and click the gear icon to go to your settings.
- click “view all settings”.
- navigate to “forwarding and pop/imap”.
- turn off the forwarding option and save the changes before updating your gmail.
If your forwarding option was enabled in error, you will need to ask the sender to resend the email to you. hopefully, that fixes your problem!
turn off your antivirus program
This step only applies to those using imap on a windows desktop client.
Some antivirus programs have an email filtering feature. this filters out emails that your antivirus thinks are a potential virus or have malicious intent. you’ll want to try and disable this feature from your antivirus program and refresh gmail or ask the sender to resend the email.
Alternatively, you can also disable your antivirus program from running at startup via task manager.
- press ctrl+shift+esc to open task manager.
- go to “startup” and find your antivirus software.
- right click your antivirus program and select “disable” to prevent it from running at startup.
reboot your computer and see if that fixed your email problem. ask your sender to forward the email to you as well. if that fixed your problem, don’t forget to turn on your antivirus when you’re done! you can let it run at startup again by repeating the steps above but clicking “enable” instead.
see google admin console
This step is more for users with a registered email under a business or gsuite subscription. if your email doesn’t end with “@gmail.com”, then this is something you can try.
Ask any of your admins to go to admin.google.com and look up your email address. They can track all email addressed to you that was sent or uploaded to Google’s servers, even if the email didn’t reach your account. if the email cannot be found on google’s servers, then the problem is with the sender.
google support
when all else fails, you can always call google’s fast customer support system. It is important to note that you should only google the number on their official contact page. there are a lot of fake google support teams out there so proceed with caution.
As a last resort, you can always ask the google help community for answers.