Is your accounts@ inbox actually getting your email?

Most businesses assume their email works. Outlook opens, Gmail loads, customers reply. Everything looks normal.

But one of the most common problems I find when I look under the hood is a business address that quietly isn't receiving what everyone thinks it is. Usually it's accounts@ or info@, and usually nobody has any idea.

The address that looks completely normal

The address exists. It shows up in the address book. Staff can email it from inside the business and it works fine, which is exactly why nobody suspects anything.

But somewhere along the way it was set up as a group that only accepts mail from inside the organisation, or as a forward to someone who left. Outside senders get a bounce-back, or their message lands in an inbox nobody reads. The people who are supposed to see that mail never get a thing, because the only person warned is the sender.

Some senders try again. Most give up, or assume the message went through. Invoices, quotes and enquiries can go missing for months this way.

Why this happens

To a customer, every address on your website looks the same. Underneath, they can work in very different ways:

• A mailbox belongs to one person.
• A shared mailbox is one inbox several people can read.
• A group or distribution list copies mail to its members, and can be restricted in who is allowed to send to it.
• An alias or forward sends mail somewhere else, sometimes to someone who left two years ago.

Problems creep in after staff changes, email migrations, or a setting chosen in a hurry the day the address was created. The result is an address that exists but quietly doesn't receive what you think it does.

A two-minute test every business should run

You don't need to be technical for this.

1. List the addresses that matter

Every address on your website, invoices, quotes, email signatures, advertising and supplier records. accounts@, info@, sales@ and admin@ are the usual suspects.

2. Send a test from outside the business

Use a personal Gmail or Outlook.com account, not your work email. A test sent from inside the business can succeed when outside mail is being refused. Send a short, unique message to each address.

3. Confirm it actually arrived

Ask whoever reads each inbox to confirm they got it. Don't assume that no bounce-back means it worked. Mail can also be delayed, filtered to junk or held in quarantine without anyone being told.

4. Make sure every address has an owner

Each important address needs a named person who reads it, including its junk folder. If nobody can say who reads info@, that's your answer.

If something doesn’t arrive

Don't delete the address or start changing settings at random. Find out what happened first.

In Microsoft 365, an administrator can run a message trace in the Exchange admin centre, which shows whether a message was delivered, rejected, filtered or redirected. Microsoft keeps that history for 90 days, so you can see exactly what was missed. Google Workspace has a similar tool called Email Log Search, with a shorter history.

The trace usually points straight at the cause, and the fix is often a single setting.

It’s not just missing email

While I'm in a business's admin centre, I nearly always find a second quiet problem: software nobody has reviewed in years.

A common one is paying for Google Workspace for email, then separately paying for Microsoft 365 so people can use Word and Excel. Sometimes that's genuinely the right setup. Often it's just what accumulated. Add a few licences still billing for staff who left, and the waste adds up.

The goal isn't to move everyone onto one platform. It's to make sure you're paying for what your team actually uses. I wrote about the billing side of this in Who is actually paying for your software?

Want me to check it properly?

I've put the two together into a fixed-price Email & Licence Health Check. I test the addresses you rely on, check how each one is set up and what the delivery records show, compare your Microsoft 365 or Google Workspace licences with what your team uses, and send you a plain-English report. Nothing gets changed without your approval.

Or start with the free IT Health Check, which looks at the wider basics of your business IT security.

Good IT isn't just fixing things when they break. It's checking the things nobody notices until they stop working.