Email tracking offers you the means to see what is going on with your emails..

Email tracking is used for checking:

• email delivery
• missing emails
• quarantined emails
• email issues

This guide explains how to track your domains email when receiving or sending emails.

What Is the email Tracker?

The email tracker allows you to see inbound and outbound emails from your domain and what happened to them.

Example uses include:

• “Tracking outbound email deliver-ability”
• “Tracking inbound emails from your clients”
• “Tracking mails that were quarantined for spam and other issues”

Email tracking help to see what is happening with your domains emails.

Before You Start

Before trying to track emails, ensure you know when the emails were sent to you of from you, make sure:

• You can log into DirectAdmin
• Your email services are working correctly

Tracking emails

Step 1 — Log Into DirectAdmin

Open your browser and visit:  https://cp.yourdomain.co.za   (Replace yourdomain.co.za with your own domain name)

Enter your hosting username and password.

Step 2 — Open Email Management

From the DirectAdmin dashboard:

Click:  E-Mail Manager

Then click:  Email Tracking

Step 3 — Select a Time Period

Click:  The from and To Time Field

Then : Set the date and time settings that you need to check. The default time is from yesterday this time until today this time by default.

Please note the From date and To date allow only a 7 day period - Select this By clicking the From date, select the date, and select the time setting, then do this for the To Date and time as well.

Step 4 — Select the Email Account

Enter the local email address you want the emails for if its a specific user that you are checking, the default is all emails. (This field is for the local email accounts the emails are being sent from, or being delivered to)

Example:  info@yourdomain.co.za

Step 5 — Select a specific email State

Typically this is not needed, as it covers all email states, ie unknown, deferred, failed, Delivered, leave this as Select to track all states.

Step 6 — Enter the Email direction.

Set the Email Direction. This is typically Select, meaning it will look at both inbound and outbound emails. If you want to track inbound emails only, select inbound

Typically if you are having mails going missing you would select Inbound to see all emails for the period, sent to the email address if you entered one.

Step 7 — Search for the emails

Click:  Search

You will now see the emails based on your selections in the list.

Common States for emails

Delivered

When you see delivered it indicates one of two things depending on the direction, if you are checking outbound mails, "Delivered" means the emails were delivered to the recipient domains MX email server, this is where our job ends, however mails still can possibly go missing on the recipients side due various factors, ie spam filters, quarantine filters, etc. If a recipient hasnt received a mail yet our logs indicated delivered, the recipient will need to speak to their IT department or ISP to investigate what happened to the email once their mail server received it.

Unknown

Emails marked as unknown are typically one of 2 things:

1.) Actual Spam we are blocking on a permanent basis.

2.) Emails that were received that either looked like spam / or had issues with their spam settings ie DMARC / SPF / DKIM, typical issues with legal mails being quarantined is due to the senders domains SPF and dmarc settings being wrong or invalid / nonexistent. If you notify us we can see why the email was quarantined, we can notify the sender of issues so it doesn't happen again, and we can release the email to your mailbox, this is called a false positive. Unfortunately this does happen sometimes. Alternatively you can whitelist the senders address in the system and spam filters will be ignored. However making your security lower to overcome someone's failure to ensure their security is right is not the best option sometimes. 

DMARC -  Domain-based Message Authentication, Reporting, and Conformance, and it works by using SPF and DKIM results to tell receiving mail servers whether to accept, quarantine, or reject unauthorized emails sent from a domain

SPF - Sender policy Framework - This is a dns record the receiving mail servers IT department sets up defining which mail servers their domains uses to send mail, if the mail server sending a mail from domain x doesn't match the list, the IT department sets a policy setting quarantine / reject. so if a user sends a mail and the mail server is not in the list they tell use reject or quarantine the message, and the mail servers obide by this policy. sometimes companies have mail setup then they move to microsoft365 or away from them to another provider and forget to update the record and the fun begins.

DKIM - Domain Key signing - Sending mail servers take certain parts of the email, sender, recipient, subject, body text typically and encrypt this, and inject it into the header of the email, the receiving mail server sees there is a DKIM signature, and goes online and retrieves the decryption key from the senders mail and decrypts the injected DKIM header, and then compares the email to this decrypted header to see if the email was in anyway modified in transit. This is to prevent other people intercepting your mail changing bank details and sending it on to the recipient, where the recipient pays them and not you for an example. 

Important Notes

Notify HostworX as soon as you are aware of an issue so we can help you fast.

Monitor Mailboxes Regularly

Even with autoresponders enabled, important email should still be monitored regularly.