This exercise is the steps to troubleshoot various levels of your internet connectivity and services.
The important take away is that you have accurately performed the local troubleshooting to 1. understand what exactly is the level of the problem. and 2. Understand who it is that you need to contact to correct the issue. Lastly, this will hopefully give you more information on hand than simply “My email isn’t working” when you do make those calls.
Test Procedure:
1. Do you have internet connectivity?
Launch a browser (ie Firefox, Internet Explorer, Safari) and go to a page that you normally wouldn’t go to, but are sure would be up.
Example: if you have google as your home page, try going to yahoo. Or go to a large news site that you don’t normally go to like, nytimes.com or cnn.com.
Q: Did the page load from the internet?
No: check your local connections and your router to ensure that these are functioning correctly.
If everything appears to be working locally, then call your Internet Service Provider (ISP) (Comcast, Cox, Qwest, etc).
Yes: proceed to the next question.
2. Are you able to receive email?
If you have someone send you an email, are you getting it in your email client (Outlook, Entourage)?
Q: Did the test email come in successfully?
No: Check the error message to see what it is telling you. Think about any changes you may have made to your system that would inhibit email from being received. If you haven’t made any changes to your email and can’t get your email to come up, proceed to question 2a:
2a. Did your website up?
You can test to see if the web server is up by going to your website (that is probably hosted on the same server as your email services) to ensure that it comes up.
Q: Did your website come up?
No: Contact your Web/ Email Service Provider (ESP) (Pinion Media).
Yes: Contact your ISP and ask them to allow email traffic (ports 110 and 25) on your connection.
If your ISP insists that your connection is fine, then contact your ESP with this information.
Yes: Proceed to the next question.
3. Are you able to send email?
Create a new email message to someone that you are sure has a valid email address and attempt to send.
Q: Did the email leave your “Out Box”?
No: Check the error message to see what it is telling you. Think about any changes you may have made to your system that would inhibit email from being sent. If you haven’t made any changes to your email and can’t get your email to send, contact your Email Service Provider (ESP) (Pinion Media).
Yes: This exercise must have been for practice and you must be grateful that you aren’t on the phone with everyone you know complaining about your internet/email not working.
If your issue is email based, but can’t get in touch with your ISP or ESP, than you may be able to use webmail to access and send email directly from the email server. If you are hosted with Pinion Media you can launch a browser and go to: http://<yourdomain>.com/webmail
You will be asked to enter your username and password, and choose an webmail client to utilize for the session.
Further reading: You can always review some additional information posted on the Pinion Media site by searching “Email”.