Can't Receive Emails on Outlook

There are various reasons Outlook won't receive new messages. Luckily, you have several fixes to get around this issue.

1. Check the Spam Folder in Outlook

Outlook has a spam-filtering option that sends junk and suspicious emails to the Spam folder. This folder is separate from your inbox, so if Outlook marked a legitimate message as spam, it might be sitting inside here.

Luckily, it's easy to move those emails back to the inbox. For the future, you can also instruct Outlook not to mark emails from that particular sender as spam in the future.

You can do this as follows:

Launch Outlook and click the Spam option in the left sidebar.

You'll see the emails that Outlook has marked as spam. If you found the email that you were expecting here, right-click on it and choose Junk, followed by Not Junk.

mark as not junk in Outlook

Before Outlook moves the email back to the inbox, it will ask if you want to always trust emails from that sender. Check the box if you want to do that, then click OK.

trust email sender in Outlook

2. Change Your Email Sorting Options

You can sort your emails using various options in Outlook. If these sorting options are configured so that they don't show the most recent emails at the top, your newly received emails might be mixed in with other messages. This makes you think you aren't receiving any emails at all in Outlook.

A quick and easy way to fix this is to change the email sorting order in Outlook, which you can do as follows:

Open Outlook and click Inbox on the left-side pane.

Click on the sort by text (which may say By Date or similar) and choose the Date option.

sort emails in outlook

At the bottom of the menu, select Newest on Top. You can also use the arrow icon next to the sort selection to change between ascending or descending.

I hope both these methods will be helpful!

Mark Wilson