Table of Contents

1. Overview
2. Check that your Internet Connection is working
3. Check Your mail using the Web Mail interface
4. Send Yourself Some mail

1. Overview

Email can stop working for a number of reasons:

 1. The whole internet is down
 2. Your email client configuration has gone bad
 3. The Email server is down

2. Check that your Internet Connection is working

All of our customers get their interent connection from some other internet service provider such as Telus or Rogers. When you suddenly can't connect to our mail server, the problem may be your internet connection. To test your internet connection, type in any search engine address such as "overture.com", search for a subject like "trains", and click on a couple of new websites you have never visited before. The reason for going through a search engine rather than just typing a web address you frequently use is to ensure your browser's cache doesn't trick you into thinking you have received a new page over the internet when in fact it came from your cache memory. The cache can give the appearance that your connection is working even when its down.

3. Check Your mail using the Web Mail interface

Every bluesoft email account can be completely controlled via your web browser , as an alternative to relying on your email client program like Microsoft Outlook. Web mail can do everything that your email client can, and can be run from any machine in the world. Some customers now use web mail for everything. At the very least, it is useful for troubleshooting, since if you can send and receive email from the web interface, then you have isolated the problem to your own machine.

To start up your webmail, type: <mail.bluesoft.ca For your user name, put in your full user Id, including the domain name, such as Fred@Serratus.ca and your password. If you can send and receive mail using the web mail interface, then the problem is in your email client configuration. See Email client Problems Or phone me and I'll help you. Note that email clients often stop working even though you may have changed nothing. For example, I ran Norton antivirus, and it changed all my Eudora settings so it no longer worked till I restored them.

4. Send Yourself Some mail

Sometimes people feel their email has stopped working because they don't see any fresh messages, or because someone tells them they sent a message but they didn't get it. The quickest way to verify that your email is indeed working is to send yourself a message from an external web mail account. For example, send a message to your main account from a hotmail or Yahoo account. If you don't have one, set one up.

If it works, that proves not only that your email account is working, but also that your domain name is working. Note that sometimes there can be a 5 minute delay from hotmail. If you don't get the email within 5 minutes in the webmail, either your email or your DNS is truly broken!

Because I do this test so often, I have set up an external web based email account from which I send messages any time I have to test either my own email, or a customer's email. If you phone me, this is often the first test I will do.