Keeping on top of deadlines, busy schedules, team organization, and client needs is a challenge. If you add some of the common email problems that we discuss in this article, your list of challenges can quickly grow.
While it’s helpful to have an IT department to deal with technical issues, it’s a good idea to know how to fix some of them yourself, so let’s get down to business.
delayed or missed emails
Delayed or missed emails are not only annoying, they can also cause you problems. Losing valuable customer-related information is one of the best ways to instantly ruin your business reputation.
Delayed or missed emails also cause uncertainty throughout the team. once this starts to happen, you will never be 100% sure that your emails will be delivered. that will force you to double check that your emails are being delivered.
so you can try email roundtrip monitoring if you want to make sure your emails reach their destination without manually checking them. this service will test the server for incoming/outgoing messages and notify you immediately if something is wrong. that way, none of your team members will have to check if the email was delivered manually, which means one less thing to worry about, team-wise.
Also, you want to check if the problem is related to your computer or to the email server itself. the best way to determine this is to access your email hosting provider’s webmail; if the emails are there, the problem is with your computer, not the server itself. If that’s the case, it’s time to reconfigure your email and app accounts.
It’s worth noting that checking webmail should always be the first step in troubleshooting email. You’ll often discover error codes or notifications that you don’t see in your email app, which will help you quickly resolve the issue. You should also invest in email lookup software to ensure you send emails to the correct recipient.
email stuck in outbox
Emails stuck in the outbox tab is another common but annoying error. this is different from the situation described above, where email delivery is delayed, but the email is not in the outbox.
If your emails are stuck in the outbox, check your internet connection. if it is slow and sends emails with attachments, it will take a long time. If you have a slow connection, it’s a better idea to send links to cloud storage services like google drive or dropbox than to add large attachments to email. uploading a file to the cloud will be faster than emailing it and you will experience errors less often.
Another reason emails get stuck in the outbox is that an antivirus plugin installed in your email software is preventing the message from being sent. you can disable the plugin or make an exception in the antivirus rules to fix the problem. if that doesn’t work, you should consider changing your antivirus software.
Antivirus tools also have problems with larger attachments, so don’t send them if you don’t have to; use cloud storage.
email hosting and disk quota errors
If you often face slow email delivery and full mailboxes, it’s time to upgrade your hosting package. the name says it all: you share server resources with other websites hosted there. that means neighboring websites will limit the server power your site can use, which will affect performance. this might not be a problem at first, but you’ll start to notice limitations as your site grows. while going through the emails and deleting the old ones you don’t need and removing the tab from the trash will help, in a moment, you’ll have to upgrade your hosting package. that will give you more storage and improve site performance, and may make other problems go away that you didn’t even know were caused by limited hosting.
misuse of emails
Here, we’re not talking about technical issues with emails, but about using them in a way that negatively affects the productivity of your team. Unfortunately, this is an email problem that most businesses face, and the only way to solve it is to educate your team members. a common problem is not using cc and answering/replying all the functions in the correct way. People often cc to tag the entire organization unnecessarily or forget to hit “reply all” when they should, replying only to the sender instead of the entire team. using emails as a replacement for everything is also a common productivity issue. Although emails are universal, if your team uses them for internal communication, that’s not good. use slack, teams, hangouts or similar services to instantly communicate and share files; will speed up the process. We also mentioned how you should use cloud storage to share large files, not email them. this is much faster and will free up a lot of space in your mailboxes. You can also use project management tools like trello, notion or asana for task management. just set them to not spam your email inboxes with notifications. As for client communication, maybe you can also invite them to your project management tools as a guest, or you can use a dedicated client portal like zendesk , tinkle or proper hyphen.
end result
fast email communication is essential for any reputable company; solving email related issues is incredibly urgent and crucial. If you follow our advice and take care of the missed or delayed emails, those that are stuck in your inbox, and make sure you have a hosting package capable of supporting regular email communication, your messages will be more likely to be saved. arrive at their destination. but, if your budget allows, it’s better to have a dedicated development team on hand to deal with technical issues than to solve random email errors on your own rather than do what you know best do: run your business.