Question

My server sends e-mail, but does not receive e-mail

Posted on February 25, 2020
Email DNS
Asked by Leonardo Teixeira

My server sends e-mail, but does not receive e-mail, it was working normally until days ago, I use Exim4 with Sendgrid.

I’ve already validated everything, and apparently it’s ok. I saw something about blocking, can someone help me?

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Leonardo Teixeira • February 27, 2020

Accepted Answer

Hey, I solved the problem and I’m going to share it here.

It was an MX record that was duplicated and with wrong information, causing the email server to get lost.

I removed the MX and after 20 hours + - started receiving emails again. I thank to help in any way, thank you very much.

alexdo

Site Moderator

• February 26, 2020

Hello, @90lteixeira

Can you find any references for the emails that are coming to your server, e.g if you send an email from test@test.com to any of your email accounts can you see any logs for the email coming from test@test.com?

If you’ve sent some test email from any email provider like Gmail, Hotmail or from any custom domain have you received any bounce back emails?

Keep in mind that issues with the mail delivery can happen due to many reasons, stuck/non responsive service, out of disk space and etc. What you can do is to make sure your server is not running out of disk space or inodes and also to restart Exim and see the exim panic log as well. The location of this should be:

/var/log/exim_paniclog or /var/log/exim/paniclog

Let me know how it goes.

Regards, Alex

alexdo

Site Moderator

• February 25, 2020

Hello, @90lteixeira

If you are not receiving email from any sender to any of the mailboxes hosted on your droplet/server you can start by checking the MX records for your domain/s. This is a starting point in the troubleshooting process and if everything is alright you can continue with your investigation. If you can find some missing/incorrect MX records you need to adjust them and wait for the DNS to propagate, this can take up to 48 hours in order to fully update, however it usually happens a lot faster.

Since you’re using Exim the next step in the troubleshooting process should be to examine the exim main log and see if there are some logged errors. You’ve mentioned that you saw some references for blocked messages or similar so what you can do is to share this information with us so we can check it and see if there is something which is causing this or if it’s something temporary or irrelevant to the main problem.

You can grep for a specific domain name or address/mailbox in the exim log using the following command:

grep "domain/mailbox" /var/log/exim_mainlog

Keep in mind that the location of the exim main log can be different according to your setup. You can also check Exim’s official documentation for: https://www.exim.org/exim-html-current/doc/html/spec_html/ch-log_files.html

Let us know how it goes.

Regards, Alex