Your email has stopped working. Here's what to check before you call.

Start by working out how big the problem is

Before anything else, find out whether it's just you. Ask one other person to check their inbox. If everyone is affected, it's the mail service, the domain or the internet connection, and there is nothing useful you can do at your own desk. If it's only you, it's your account, your password or your Outlook profile, and it's usually quick.

The four checks, in order

• Open webmail in a browser and sign in. If mail works there, Outlook is the problem, not your email.
• Check whether anything else on the internet loads. No internet means no email, and the fix is a different phone call.
• Think about whether anyone changed a password recently — yours, or an account someone in the office shares.
• Look for a prompt sitting behind another window. Outlook often stops sending because it is quietly waiting for you to approve a sign-in.

If webmail works and Outlook doesn't, close Outlook completely, wait ten seconds and reopen it. That resolves a surprising share of one-person outages. If it comes back with a password box, do not keep retyping the password — repeated failures can lock the account and turn a five-minute problem into an afternoon.

What we do when you call

We check the service status, then your account, then the domain records that control mail delivery. Most single-user faults are fixed remotely in under twenty minutes. Whole-office outages are usually either a provider incident, an expired domain or a DNS change someone made without realising what it affected.

Stopping it happening again

Recurring email problems almost always trace back to one of three things: a mailbox that has filled up, authentication records that were never configured on the domain, or a shared account that several people sign into at once. All three are fixable permanently rather than repeatedly.

• Set up multi-factor authentication so a compromised password isn't an outage.
• Fix SPF, DKIM and DMARC on your domain so mail delivers and doesn't get spoofed.
• Replace shared logins with a shared mailbox that each person accesses under their own account.