Emails Not Arriving

Use this guide when mail has stopped arriving from all of your aliases, or when a brand-new alias has never received anything. If only one specific alias stopped forwarding while the others keep working, you want Alias Not Forwarding instead. Work through the checks below in order; the first two or three sort out most cases.

1. Why is my email in the spam folder?#

Check this first: it causes more missing mail than everything else combined. Forwarded mail passes through a forwarding server instead of coming straight from the original sender, and providers like Gmail and Outlook sometimes treat that as spam, especially for new aliases with no sending history.

Look: open the Spam label in Gmail (or the Junk Email folder in Outlook) and search for the missing message.

If you find it there:

1. Tell your provider it was wrong. In Gmail, open the message and click Not spam. In Outlook, right-click the message and choose Report as not junk.
2. Stop it happening again. Add the sender to your contacts, or build a filter so the mail skips the spam folder entirely. In Gmail, create a filter under Settings > Filters and Blocked Addresses and tick Never send it to Spam.

For more on taming Gmail's filters, read How to Stop Spam Emails in Gmail.

2. Why is my alias switched off?#

Look: open the Aliases page in your dashboard and find the alias. A green toggle means it is active. Grey means it is switched off, and every message sent to it bounces straight back to the sender with a delivery failure notice.

Fix: click the toggle to switch the alias back on, then send yourself a test email. Aliases get switched off by accident far more often than you would think, usually while tidying up the dashboard.

3. Why is my destination not verified?#

Look: open the Destinations page. Each destination inbox shows a status, and if yours reads unverified, AliasFleet cannot deliver to it. Forwarded mail is held rather than sent on.

Fix: run through verification for that destination. See Verifying a Destination for the exact steps. Worth checking even if your destinations were fine before: if you recently changed the inbox address, the new one needs its own verification.

4. Am I checking the right inbox?#

Look: open the alias detail page and check which destination it forwards to. With more than one destination (say a personal Gmail and a work Outlook account), the alias may be forwarding perfectly, just not to the inbox you are staring at.

Fix: point the alias at the destination you actually check, or open the inbox it currently points to. This mix-up is common right after adding a second destination.

5. Could this be a delivery delay rather than a failure?#

Look: email is not always instant. A busy sending server, greylisting, or a slow receiving provider can each hold a message for several minutes.

Fix: wait ten minutes after sending a test email before declaring something broken. For a clean test, send from an address you control (your own Gmail, say) to the alias, and keep the message short. One simple test rules out quirks on the sender's side.

6. Is my destination inbox full?#

Look: providers stop accepting mail once a mailbox goes over quota. Gmail shares 15 GB across Gmail, Drive, and Photos, and silently rejects new mail once it fills up. Outlook.com has its own storage limit, with a warning banner at the top of the inbox.

Fix: free up space in the destination inbox, then resend a test email. Anything sent while the inbox was full may need to be resent by the original sender.

7. Is my custom domain set up correctly?#

Look: if the quiet alias uses a custom domain and has never received anything, the problem is usually DNS, not forwarding. Mail for the domain is not reaching AliasFleet's servers at all.

Fix: confirm the domain's MX records still point at AliasFleet. See DNS Not Verifying.

8. Could the sender be the problem?#

Look: if mail from one specific sender never arrives while everyone else's comes through, the fault is almost certainly on their side. Their server may be rate-limited, misconfigured, on a blocklist, or failing strict SPF or DMARC checks that trip during forwarding.

Fix: ask the sender whether they got a bounce or delivery failure notice, and what it said. The bounce text usually names the exact cause (for example "recipient address rejected" or "message blocked due to spam content").

How do I verify the fix worked?#

Send a test email to the alias from an address you control and confirm it lands in the destination inbox within ten minutes, not in spam. If the test arrives but the original sender's mail still does not, the problem sits with that sender (see check 8).

Still not working?#

If you have worked through every check above and emails still are not arriving, open a support ticket and include:

• The alias address
• The destination it forwards to
• When the problem started (a date, or "since I created the alias")
• What you have already checked from the list above
• Any bounce message text the sender received, copied exactly