Staying on top of deadlines, busy schedules, team organization, and customer needs are challenging. If you add some of the common email problems we discuss in this article, your list of challenges can rapidly grow.

While it's helpful to have an IT department to deal with technical issues, it's a good idea to know how to fix some of them yourself, so let's get to business.

Delayed or lost emails

Delayed or lost Emails are not only annoying, but they can also get you in trouble. Losing precious client-related information is one of the best ways to ruin your business reputation instantly.

Delayed/lost emails also cause team-wide uncertainty. Once this starts happening, you will never be 100% certain that your emails are delivered. That will force you to double-check your emails are getting delivered.

Therefore, you can try email round-trip monitoring if you want to ensure your emails get to their destination without manually checking. This service will test the server for incoming/outgoing messages and notify you immediately if something is wrong. That way, none of your team members will have to check if the email was delivered manually, which means having one thing less to worry about, team-wise.

Also, you want to check if the issue is related to your computer or the email server itself. The best way to determine this is to access your email hosting provider's webmail – if the emails are there, the problem is in your computer, not the server itself. If that's the case, it's time to reconfigure your email accounts and apps.

It's worth noting that checking webmail should always be your first step when troubleshooting email issues. It will often uncover error codes or notifications that you won't see in your email app, helping you solve the problem quickly.

Email stuck in outbox

Emails stuck in the outbox tab is another common yet annoying bug. This is different from the situation described above, where the email delivery is delayed, but the email isn't in the outbox folder.

If your emails are stuck in the outbox, check your internet connection. If it's slow and you send emails with attachments, it will take very long. If you have a slow connection, it's a better idea to send links to cloud storage services such as Google Drive or Dropbox than to add large attachments to the email itself. Uploading a file to the cloud will be faster than sending it via email, and you will experience errors less frequently.

Another reason emails get stuck in the outbox is that an antivirus plugin installed in your email software prevents the message from being sent. You can disable the plugin or make an exception in the antivirus rules to fix the issue. If that doesn't work, you should consider changing your antivirus software.

Antivirus tools also have issues with larger attachments, so don't send those if you don't have to; use cloud storage.

Bad email hosting and disk quota errors

If you often face slow email delivery and full mailboxes, it's time to upgrade your hosting package.

The name says it all – you share server resources with other websites hosted there. That means neighbor websites will limit the server power your site can use, affecting performance. This might not be a problem at first, but you will start noticing limitations as your site grows.

While going through the emails and deleting old ones you don't need and expunging the trash tab will help, at one point, you will need to upgrade your hosting package. That will give you more storage and improve site performance, and may make some other issues go away that you didn't even know were caused by limited hosting.

Misusing emails

Here, we are not talking about technical issues with emails but using them in a way that negatively affects productivity in your team. Unfortunately, this is an email problem most businesses face, and the only way to solve it is to educate your team members.

A common problem is not using the CC and reply/reply all functions the right way. People frequently use CC to tag the whole organization unnecessarily or forget to hit "reply all" when they should, only replying to the sender instead of the whole team.

Using emails as a replacement for everything is also a common productivity issue. Even though emails are universal, if your team uses them for internal communication, that's no good. Use Slack, Teams, Hangouts, or similar services for instant communication and file sharing instead; it will speed up the process.

We also mentioned how you should use cloud storage to share large files, not send them by email. This is much faster and will clear up a lot of space in your mailboxes.

You can also use project management tools such as Trello, Notion, or Asana for managing tasks. Just configure them not to spam your email inboxes with notifications.

As for the client communication, maybe you can also invite them to your project management tools as guests, or you can use a dedicated client portal such as Zendesk, Clinked, or Suitedash.

Bottom Line

Swift email communication is essential for any reputable business; solving email-related issues is incredibly urgent and crucial.

Following our tips and taking care of lost and delayed emails, those stuck in your inbox, and ensuring you have a hosting package capable of withstanding regular email communication will make it more likely for your messages to reach their destination.

But, if your budget allows, it's best to have a dedicated development team at hand that will deal with technical issues than solving random email errors on your own instead of doing what you do best – running your business.