Emails suddenly stopped sending and receiving
Hello. As of Friday evening (2025-11-07) all email accounts on my server have been unable to send or receive emails. There are no bounces. I only just sent test emails from gmail to these accounts an hour ago, so unsure if those are going to bounce back or not, but I have not yet received them or received any bounces. As far as I know, nothing at all has changed. First thing I tried was a reboot, no help. All the normal ports are open. Email deliverability shows everything is good. The mail troubleshooter doesn't give me any errors. Hostgator support can't find anything wrong but they escalated it and no help yet. I can't put in a ticket since the cPanel license was purchased through hostgator.
The only thing I can find that has changed is that cPanel installed an update on the day everything stopped working (I just not though to check that):
tail -5 /var/cpanel/updatelogs/summary.log
[2025-09-12 16:59:07 -0500] Completed update 11.130.0.9 -> 11.130.0.11
[2025-09-19 16:53:27 -0500] Completed update 11.130.0.11 -> 11.130.0.12
[2025-09-26 16:53:13 -0500] Completed update 11.130.0.12 -> 11.130.0.14
[2025-10-17 16:53:30 -0500] Completed update 11.130.0.14 -> 11.130.0.15
[2025-11-07 16:56:06 -0600] Completed update 11.130.0.15 -> 11.132.0.7
This seems like too big of a coincidence.
PLEASE HELP!!! THANK YOU IN ADVANCE!!!
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I ran a cPanel update again just now manually and the second it completed, some emails started coming in. It is still processing old emails and I have not received the test email I just sent to my gmail account yet. Of note is that the cPanel version is still 132.0.7 (before and after this manual udpate) and the summary.log did not update at all.
The majority of the emails rolling in now are the notification from cPanel that the mailscanner service was down. I honestly didn't check the service status so I can't say if it was down earlier (and emails are still slowing rolling in). I will update again once everything appears to settle.
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Okay, so emails are still processing however I have received incoming and outgoing test messages that were sent both before and after I ran the manual cPanel update. I have no idea what happened or why or if this is a known issue or just a fluke with my server.
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If you go to WHM -> Service Configuration -> Service Manager
is Mailscanner monitored?If Mailscanner is stopped then emails are not delivered.
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It was and is monitored which is why it tried to send several hundred notices that mailscanner was down...but of course those emails wouldn't go through since mailscanner was down.
But a reboot of the server and several other things that were tried didn't fix the problem. The only thing that fixed it was trying to run a cPanel update again.
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You're likely affected by this case with Mailscanner, as quietFinn said:
Can you try the workaround listed there and let me know if that works for you? You can also follow along with that case and receive an update once the issue is resolved.
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I will try that workaround if it fails again, but as everything is currently working, I do not want to risk it going down again.
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