Why did my incoming email disappear? Where did it go?

Question

Why did my incoming email disappear?  Where did it go? 

Answer

To track down an incoming email, you must be a cPanel or WHM user. Webmail only users do not have the access needed to track incoming messages. If you would like a webmail user to be able to view reports for the email that they received, as well as the email they sent, please visit our feature requests forum.

If you are a cPanel user, you will look in the Track Delivery interface of your cPanel. If you are a WHM user, you will look in the Mail Delivery Reports interface of WHM.

cPanel users will have one box on the top for entering the recipient's email address. Enter it and click either "Run Report" or "Show All". WHM users have a "Report Inquiry" box, where they can choose to find the message in several different ways. The most similar to the cPanel interface will be to put in the recipient's email address, select "recipient" from the drop-down menu, and select "partial" from the "Search Type".

Now you should see the Delivery Reports table. The two columns of interest to us are on the ends - the first and last columns. The first column tells you if the mail ended up in a mailbox at all. If it was not, a yellow filtered image will be visible. If it did, then the green delivered image will be there instead. To determine what happened to the message, we will bring up the detailed information pop-up box. If you are a cPanel user, click on the blue info icon. If you are a WHM user, click on the grey magnifying glass.

In the pop-up box, you are looking for the line that says "Delivered To". If the message was filtered (with the yellow image), the "Delivered To" line is likely to say "/dev/null", which means deleted, and this message is gone forever. If the message was successfully delivered (with the green image), the "Delivered To" line says "user+folder"@recipientsdomain.tld. The email user who received the mail will be first, followed by a plus sign, and then the name of the folder where the message ended up.   For instance, if you see "juan+work"@example.com, you know to check juan@example.com's email account and look in the "work" folder. 

Note: Your server retains email data to populate this report for the number of days that you set in Tweak Settings (default 30). If you need to review further back than that, your server administrator may be able to find the information in the Exim logs from the command line.