Why has my custom domain email (@company.ro) stopped working?

One morning you send a quote and get a bounce message back. Or worse, you get nothing — clients simply stop writing and you only find out a week later that your email is dead. A custom-domain address (contact@company.ro) is the backbone of your client communication, and when it goes down, you lose money in silence.

The good news: in almost every case, the cause is one of a few mundane problems — an expired domain, unpaid hosting, an MX record accidentally deleted during a website migration, or a full mailbox. In this guide I'll show you how to diagnose it yourself, in the right order, without blaming the wrong thing and without paying anyone before you know what you're looking for.

First step: what exactly stopped working?

Before anything else, narrow the problem down. Don't just say "email isn't working" — pin down what broke:

• Can't send but can receive? Likely an SMTP or password setting.
• Receiving but can't send? Same — outgoing server or authentication.
• Neither sending nor receiving? Now we're talking domain, hosting or MX.
• Sending fine, but messages land in spam for the recipient? That's a reputation issue (SPF/DKIM), not a functionality one.

Test it simply: send an email from your address to a personal Gmail, then reply from Gmail back to @company.ro. Within minutes you'll see which direction is blocked. Skip this step and you risk fixing something that was never broken.

The usual suspects: expired domain, unpaid hosting, full mailbox

The most common causes are also the most boring — which is exactly why they get overlooked:

• The domain expired. If you didn't renew it, the whole domain disappears: both the website and the email. Check the expiry date with the registrar where you bought it.
• Email hosting wasn't paid. Many businesses keep email on a separate package from the site. If the invoice went unpaid, the mailboxes get suspended even though the domain is valid.
• The mailbox is full. You have a limited quota (a few GB, say). Once it fills up, you stop receiving anything new and senders get a "mailbox full" error. Empty the trash, old archives and large sent attachments.

These often get fixed within an hour, with no technician. Check them before you panic-call anyone.

MX records: the heart of the problem

MX (Mail Exchange) records are the DNS entries that tell the internet "email for @company.ro is delivered to this server". If they're missing or wrong, messages sent to you have nowhere to land and are either lost or bounced.

Most often they break during a migration: you moved the site to a new company, someone changed the nameservers or reset the DNS zone and, without meaning to, wiped the old MX records. The website works, but email dies — because the two are controlled by different records.

How to check: go to a free tool like MXToolbox, type company.ro and run an "MX Lookup". If no record shows up, or one appears that has nothing to do with your email provider, you've found the problem. The fix happens in the DNS panel and generally propagates within a few hours.

Email leaves but lands in spam? SPF, DKIM and DMARC

If email "works" but consistently lands in spam or gets rejected, the problem isn't delivery, it's reputation. Recipient servers check whether you actually have the right to send from company.ro, and that's done through three DNS records:

• SPF — the list of servers authorized to send on your domain's behalf.
• DKIM — a cryptographic signature proving the message wasn't forged.
• DMARC — the rule telling servers what to do when SPF/DKIM don't match.

If you switched email providers (say you moved to Google Workspace) and didn't update these records, your messages look "suspicious" and end up in spam. Check them with MXToolbox too and make sure they include your new provider. This cause is very often ignored, because technically the email "leaves".

Server problem, or just your phone?

Not every outage is on the domain. Sometimes email is perfectly fine, but the app on your phone or in Outlook lost its authentication:

• You recently changed the password on the web, but not in the app.
• The provider now requires app passwords or two-step verification.
• The port settings are wrong: IMAP usually uses port 993, and sending (SMTP) uses port 465 or 587, both with SSL/TLS.

How to tell quickly: log into webmail from a browser (your provider's webmail address). If email works there, the problem is only on your device — re-enter the password or reconfigure the account. If webmail doesn't work either, the problem is on the server, the domain or the hosting, and you go back to the steps above.

How to stop it happening again — and where to get help

Most email outages are prevented with a few simple habits:

• Turn on auto-renewal for both the domain and the hosting, so you don't depend on a forgotten invoice.
• Remember the site and email can live with different providers — before any migration, write down your current MX records.
• Don't let just anyone "poke around" in the DNS zone; a single wrong deletion cuts all email.

If you've worked through this guide and still can't spot the blockage, I can check your DNS and MX setup and tell you exactly what's broken, without guessing. I work remotely, nationwide, with transparent pricing, and I explain what happened in plain terms. Message me on WhatsApp with your domain (company.ro) and a short note about what's not working, and I'll take a look.