Gmail Not Receiving Emails

An email sent from a Gmail account is delivered in seconds and is highly unlikely to be marked as spam (unless the message is literally spam). Gmail also has an excellent spam filter, which means that your own inbox will be free of irrelevant messages.

If you are unable to receive emails in your Gmail account, please do the following basic checks.

Check Gmail on other devices. Specifically, you need to check if you can receive messages in the Gmail application on your phone. If you don't have the Gmail app installed, install it and set up your account.

Access Gmail directly. If you are trying to receive messages through a Gmail account set up with an email client, try accessing it in your browser and check if you are receiving messages.

Check your spam folder. Emails may go to spam folder. If so, select an email and click the no spam option to move them to the inbox.

Check whether Gmail is inactive or not from the app's status page.

Check other Google services, for example YouTube and Google Drive to see if they connect. Otherwise, Google services may be down or may be blocked by your ISP or country.

Try to send an email: send a message and see if it is sent successfully. You can try emailing yourself.

Use a VPN and check if your messages start coming through. If so, Gmail is likely blocked by your ISP or your government.

Try accessing Gmail in a different browser. Your default browser may have corrupted files or an extension or plug-in you have installed is blocking incoming messages from appearing.

Try connecting to a different network and see if your messages start coming through.

Why is Gmail not receiving emails?

If you still can't get emails in Gmail after doing the basic checks above, try the fixes below.

1. Disable the antivirus

If you are using Gmail with a desktop email client and you are not receiving messages in your inbox, try disabling the antivirus you are using. In Windows 10, you can use Windows Defender as it doesn't block Gmail and related services.

Other antivirus apps may be more strict about what is and is not allowed. If you want to keep using your antivirus instead of Windows Defender, please add the Gmail domain to the antivirus whitelist.

2. Check the Gmail storage limit

The emails are small in size, but the attachments are comparatively larger. Gmail limits attachments to 25MB, but your Gmail storage can still fill up. If it is full, it will prevent messages from being delivered to you.

Visit this link in your browser and log in with your Gmail account.

If your storage is full, you must release it before you can receive emails.

Storage is shared between Gmail, Google Drive, and Google Photos. You can free up space by deleting old emails, deleting files from Google Drive, or deleting photos from Google Photos.

3. Remove the filters from the messages.

Gmail filters are an automation tool to classify messages into labels or folders. If you configured filters incorrectly, you may be sending your messages to a tag / folder, automatically archiving or deleting them.

Open Gmail.

Click on the cogwheel button in the upper right.

Select View all settings.

Go to the Filters and Blocked Addresses tab.

Remove active filters and check for new messages.

4. Check and disable email forwarding.

If you have email forwarding set up for your Gmail account, it may be interfering with your messages. Typically, email forwarding does not prevent a message from reaching your inbox. Just forward the new message to a predefined email address. That being said, it can still cause problems.

Visit Gmail in your browser.

Click on the cogwheel button in the upper right.

Select View all settings.

Go to the Forwarding and POP / MAP tab.

Disable forwarding.

Why am I not receiving my emails?

If you can see your messages in the Gmail web interface, but they don't appear on a desktop client, it is likely a problem with the client. You can delete the account and connect it again to see if the messages start to be delivered.