Someone says they sent you an email an hour ago. A login code never turns up. Your inbox has gone strangely quiet. Those are usually one of three problems: the mail reached your account and was moved, it was turned away before it reached you, or it never left the sender.
The fastest way to tell them apart is to search your whole account, then send yourself a test from a different email account. If the test arrives, your account is receiving mail and the trouble is limited to certain messages or senders. If nothing arrives at all, look at storage first, because a full account can stop every incoming message at once.
Start here: search Spam and All Mail before changing anything
On a computer, run the search below. If the message appears, it arrived, and the label on it tells you where it went. Google deletes mail in Spam and Trash permanently after 30 days, or sooner if you empty those folders, so look soon.
- Open Gmail on a computer. In the search bar at the top, click 'Show search options'.
- Next to 'Search', click the 'All Mail' dropdown and choose 'Mail & Spam & Trash'.
- Enter what you know, such as the sender's address, and click 'Search'. The in:anywhere search operator does the same job from the search bar.
- Found in Spam: tick the message and click 'Not spam'. Google says future emails from that sender then won't go to Spam, and adding the sender to Google Contacts helps too.
- Found only under 'All Mail' (click 'More' on the left to see it): the message was archived. A filter or POP setting may be doing this, so read causes two and three.
- Check the tabs. In the Default inbox type, Gmail sorts mail into Primary, Social, Promotions, Updates and Forums. Drag a message to the 'Primary' tab if it belongs there.
- Only missing in the app? Check mail.google.com on a computer. In the Android app, swipe down from the top of your inbox. Google says syncing can take up to 15 minutes, longer if the device has been idle. Then open the app's settings, choose your account and make sure 'Sync Gmail' is ticked under 'Data usage'.
Cause 1: Your Google storage is full
Your account has up to 15 GB of storage shared among Gmail, Google Drive and Google Photos, unless you pay for more. Google's wording is blunt: when your account reaches its storage limit, you can't send or receive emails, and messages sent to you go back to the sender.
Because those messages are returned rather than held, clearing space only helps with new mail. Anyone whose message bounced will need to send it again. To get under the limit:
- See what is using the space: in Google Drive, click 'Storage' in the left-hand menu, which lists your Drive files from largest to smallest.
- Empty Trash and Spam in Gmail, and the trash in Drive and Photos. Those items count against your limit until they are permanently cleared.
- Find large emails by searching Gmail for has:attachment larger:10M, then tick the ones you don't need and delete them.
- Give it time. Google says to allow up to 48 to 72 hours after deleting many files at once. Deleted items may be gone for good, so check before you clear them.
- If you can't clear enough, buy more storage through Google One. Google says content becomes eligible for deletion once an account has been over its quota for 2 years, with at least 3 months' notice.
Cause 2: A filter or blocked address is catching the mail
A rule you made months ago to tidy up newsletters can quietly swallow something you need. A blocked sender behaves differently: Google says their future emails go to Spam, and they keep being treated as spam even after you move a message out of that folder.
- In Gmail on a computer, click 'Settings' at the top right, then 'See all settings'.
- Click the 'Filters and Blocked Addresses' tab.
- In the list of filters, look for the words 'Delete it' and 'Skip Inbox'. Also look for filters that forward mail somewhere else.
- On the right of a filter, click 'Edit' or 'Delete'.
- On the same tab, find the sender in your blocked list, tick the box and click 'Unblock selected addresses'. Their future emails then go to your inbox.
Cause 3: Forwarding or POP is moving mail out of your inbox
Both can make mail seem to vanish. Open 'Settings', then 'See all settings', then the 'Forwarding and POP/IMAP' or 'Forwarding' tab.
If forwarding is on, Google's missing-mail steps are to select 'Keep Gmail's copy in the Inbox' or 'Mark Gmail's copy as read', then click 'Save Changes'. To stop it, select 'Disable forwarding' and save. Read the forwarding address while you are there.
POP lets another mail program download your messages, and Gmail then follows the option under 'When messages are accessed with POP'. Google's help points to 'Archive Gmail's copy' and 'Delete Gmail's copy' as the settings to look for when mail disappears. Select 'Keep Gmail's copy in the Inbox' and click 'Save Changes'. In the mail program itself, turn on the setting that leaves messages on the server. Gmail keeps one copy of each email, so deleting a message on any synced device deletes it everywhere. Remove anything you don't recognize under 'Third-party apps & services' in your Google Account.
Google also says that if your emails go to an unfamiliar address, someone may have unauthorized access to your account. Its guide to securing a compromised account lists automatic forwarding, blocked addresses, POP access and incoming mail filters among the settings to correct immediately if you see unfamiliar changes, and says to remove any filters or forwarding rules you didn't set up. If that is what you find, do this as well:
- Change your password immediately, and change it on any other site where you reuse it.
- In your Google Account, open 'Security & sign-in', select 'Review security events', and choose 'No, it wasn't me' for anything you didn't do.
- Under 'Your devices', select 'Manage devices'. For anything unfamiliar, choose 'Don't recognize a device?' and follow the prompts.
- Turn off the forwarding and delete the filters you didn't create. Then turn on 2-Step Verification and check your recovery phone and email.
Cause 4: Gmail has an outage, or your work account has a problem
The Google Workspace Status Dashboard at google.com/appsstatus/dashboard lists Gmail and uses the labels 'Available', 'Service information', 'Service disruption' and 'Service outage'. It describes itself as covering services that are part of Google Workspace and doesn't say whether that includes personal accounts.
If your address comes from an employer, school or your own business domain, some causes are out of your hands. Google's help for Workspace administrators lists MX records that don't point to Google's mail servers, a suspended account, whose incoming mail bounces back to the sender, and a domain host disabling the account, often over an expired domain registration or a payment problem. Administrators can also run Email Log Search, which looks through messages sent to the organization in the past 30 days and can show mail that went to spam or was routed incorrectly. Give your admin the sender's address and the time it was sent.
Cause 5: The problem is on the sender's side
If your test message arrives but one person's mail doesn't, ask them what they see on their end. A bounce notice states why delivery failed. Google says a sender using Gmail should look in their Inbox and Spam for a message from 'Mail Delivery Subsystem', often with the subject 'Delivery Status Notification (Failure)', and can wait a few hours to see whether one arrives.
- They have the wrong address. Have them check for typos, stray quotation marks, trailing dots and spaces.
- It never left. Ask them to check their Sent Mail and Drafts.
- The error says 'The user you are trying to contact is receiving mail at a rate that prevents additional messages from being delivered'. Gmail limits how much mail an account can get in a day, without publishing a figure on that page, and Google says the sender will need to reach you another way.
- It was flagged as spam or temporarily rejected, or the error points to a temporary problem with your inbox. Google's advice is for the sender to adjust suspicious content or try again later.
- It's a login code from a website. Check which address your profile there uses, then ask for it to be sent again.
How to stop it happening again
A few small habits cover most of this.
- Keep some storage free, and clear Trash and Spam now and then.
- Add people you can't afford to miss to Google Contacts, and press 'Not spam' when a good message lands in Spam.
- Read your filter list a couple of times a year and delete rules you no longer need.
- Don't ignore a forwarding notice. Gmail shows one for the first week after forwarding is turned on. If you see one and never set it up, Google says to change your password immediately and turn forwarding off.
- Use 2-Step Verification, so a stolen password alone can't get someone into your account.
If people need to reach you without relying on email first
If what you keep missing is enquiries or sign-ups, a OneSol form is one alternative to asking people to email you: they don't need to sign in to fill it in, and you are emailed each new response, so get your inbox working first. A free OneSol account is enough to make one.