Trouble-shooting possible email delivery problems using the Proofpoint Essentials Interface

In short, this can be done using the 'Status' column in the Email Logs section of the Proofpoint Essentials Interface.

Note: Silent users do not have permission to log into the interface, hence cannot perform this action. Please contact your admin to research the logs.

When reviewing the logs for the desired recipient, you may narrow the search by inputting these parameters (and also speeding up your research process):

• recipient address
• sender address
• message subject

Up to 1000 results will be returned in a table where you can use the search tool to perform a very quick filter of the result set.  In addition, you may also select a message 'Status' to further refine your search. A message log status can be defined as the following

• Any - Message of any status listed below
• Quarantined - Message not delivered to end recipient
• Reported (Misclassified) - ?
• Blocked - Filter fired, message not delivered
• Cleared - message made it to end recipient
• Cleared (but queued for delivery) - message intended for delivery, has not cleared Proofpoint Essentials system
• Cleared (but bounced by destination) - message delivered, but end server bounced back
• Cleared (released from quarantine) - message initially not delivered, then released.

Hover your mouse over the status itself to see a tooltip with some more information.  (You can also click on the log line to bring up the Email Detail page which contains the email's Permalink which we can use as reference if you need to contact support.)  An email can have any of the following statuses:

• delivered - This message has been accepted by the SMTP destination server, has left Proofpoint Essentials, and should be arriving at the recipient any moment now if not already (unless something is very, very wrong with the SMTP destination server - in that case the administrator of THAT server will need to be notified ASAP).
• delayed - This message cannot be delivered right now, but will be queued for a week and delivery will be retried at sane intervals.  The reason will be displayed in the tooltip, and may range from timeouts (server not available / firewalled), to server configuration problems (the destination server's disk may be full...), etc. etc.  After 24h of queuing the sender gets notified.
• expired - We have retried this message for a week now and it simply expired from the queue, and a bounce message will have been generated for the sender.
• bounced - This message has been rejected by the SMTP destination server for any of a large number of reasons.  The most common reason is that the destination server only allows known email addresses and a typo has been made in the local part of the recipient email address (if the typo was in the domain, it would not have reached here in the first place).
• <blank> - If the Status column is empty, the message is still actively being queued for the first time and its status is still being determined.  It might be a large email, or the destination server is busy, or waiting for a connection timeout.
• quarantined - This is the default Status of everything classified as Spam, and indicates that we have halted delivery, but the message may be released.

For INBOUND mail logs, if messages are not showing up here, please verify the following:

• Please ensure that your MX record is appropriately pointed to the correct server.
• Ensure that the sender has the recipient address correctly spelled
• Make sure that the sender has sent the message. (May want to request to have their mail provider show the logs from their side.)
• A reasonable amount of time has passed!  (email is not an instantaneous protocol, and although most emails are pretty quick, there are no guarantees.  Many factors may influence this: large emails and clients with low bandwidth or out-of-hours prioritization, greylisting on poorly-configured clients, sender's synchronizing with outbound servers only periodically, temporary DNS problems, other transient internet conditions, etc. etc.)

For OUTBOUND mail logs, if messages are not showing up here, please verify with your using the following:

• Their SMTP server name configuration in their mail client.
• Your IP/server name is properly set in the Company Settings > Domains.