Troubleshooting Email Issues

Support: Email:  Troubleshooting Email

Your email, your way. One of our primary philosophies at Cotse is to provide the end user the ability to setup their mail, their way. We have a multitude of options to choose from. From time to time, users forget about certain filters and other settings they have in place. Below, you will find some of the common issues we've seen through our email support system. Please take the time to browse the troubleshooting guide. If you don't find what you're looking for, make sure you check out the Support Mainpage for different subjects that may cover your trouble.

Please note that troubleshooting sending problems with Outlook Express is covered in the Outlook Configuration file.

See also the Troubleshooting Email Sending Problems file.

No longer receiving email?

Mail to Me is Bouncing Back to Sender

One of the most common issues we've received since developing our extensive line of email filters is the problem of users missing and/or losing emails after turning on a particular filter.

The main way of fixing this depends on you. We request that you check any and all filters prior to reporting a problem to Cotse Support. Each filter, when enabled, may turn off the ability for you to receive mail. Whether you're using Goldlisting and only allowing certain email addresses to send you mail or you're using one of the other filters, your email could be trapped in your Spam folder, or if you've decided, it could reside in your Trash folder. The worst case scenerio is that you've sent the messages to /dev/null, which means thay have already been deleted and are unrecoverable.

If you use a desktop email client and suddenly stop receiving email, login to your account via the web interface and check your Spam and Trash folders. If your mail isn't there, do check all your filter settings to see if a setting is causing the problem.

One of the common problems we encounter is that our users configure spam-fighting filters, and then pop to mail, so they never actually see how big their spam folder or trash folder is getting until they find themselves unable to get any new mail because they have exceeded the space limits for their account.

If your friends or coworkers notify you that their mail to you is bouncing back, you should immediately check to see if your Spam folder, Trash folder, and/or Sent folder requiring emptying.

Make it a point to clear out your spam folder on a frequent and regular basis.

If mail to you is bouncing back to sender and you can't login to your account, your account may have been disabled due to nonpayment, abuse of the service, or exceeding the space allowance for your mail. You can email helpdesk at cotse.net for further information and instructions.

Troubleshooting: Automatic Logout or "Timing Out"

Email is SLOW! HELP!

If you are getting "timed out" messages while logged into the web mail interface for long periods of time, it may be because of the default setting in the webmail interface. To prevent the automatic logout:

• Click on "Options"
• Click "Folder Preferences"  
• Under "Folder List Preferences" on that page, change the "Auto Refresh Folder List" setting to 10 minutes or less.
• Click "Submit" at the bottom of the page.

First, there's a few things you can check to make sure your account isn't causing the slow-down. What we've found is that users will sometimes leave too much mail in their inbox. If you have many messages, somewhere around 100+ in your Inbox Folder, your email will be slow and will gradually get slower when additional messages are acrued. If you're going to keep many messages on the server, it's best to create folders and store your messages in the folders. We also offer you the ability to archive posts within a folder for transfer to your hard drive if you would like to do that.

If you don't have a lot of mail in your account (and don't forget to check your Spam, Trash, and Sent folders for mail you need to purge), you can try to traceroute the server from command line and check the server response. This will show any lag between devices along the way to Cotse.

If you're not familiar with traceroute, in Windows, open a "MSDOS Prompt". Type: tracert www.cotse.net

This will show you the course your connection takes to get to our servers. Response times between 0.000 and 0.300 is good. 0.300 to 0.700 is ok for a dialup, 0.700 -> 1.0+ is bad.

f you have trouble understanding the response times, copy/paste the response to an email to me and I will help. You may have trouble copying the information in the DOS prompt. If you do, click the icon in the top left of the DOS window, click "edit", then "mark", click on the top left portion of the information you wish to copy, drag your mouse across the entire contents you wish to copy, release the left mouse button, click the right mouse button. Now go to the email message you're sending me, right click and paste.