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Email - Troubleshooting & Technical Details

Brenda McDonald
  • Updated

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How does it work?

Membrain contacts the users' email server to send and receive emails on their behalf. Connections are made via industry standard IMAP and SMTP protocols supported by all mail servers.

Authentication

Membrain servers authenticate to the users' mail server using a range of industry standard protocols, depending on what email account you have, including OAuth2.0 and Microsoft Modern Authentication.

Encryption

TLS 1.2/1.3 is used to encrypt mail to allow for data integrity and communication security. TLS encryption is mandated for all email communication to and from Membrain.

General Troubleshooting

You or a colleague have gone through the setup steps in our article, but it's just not working. Don't worry! We'll sort this out together. Start with these initial steps to troubleshoot:

  1. Is it the right password?
    Confirm that you are entering the password that you use for your email account and not the password you use to log into Membrain.

  2. Is the username & password combination correct?
    There could be a problem with the username, password, or server name you have entered. Try this by manually entering your login details in your email software, or a web-based version of your email such as www.gmail.com or login.microsoftonline.com to confirm you have the correct username and password.

    (Some variation of this is actually the single most common issue, and a lot of it comes from how rarely we typically enter these details ourselves nowadays.)

  3. The username & password are correct but it still doesn't work!
    In some cases, your email address may need to be replaced by a Windows user domain name, eg: subdomain\username. It's best to confirm the details with your IT Contact, but it may be that the username you need to enter isn't your email address.

Office365 - Troubleshooting

  1. If you see a Need Admin Approval window during the setup you will need to ask your Office365 administrator to enable a setting in your organization's Office365 account to allow access from Membrain. This article Allow Membrain access to Office365 brings you through the steps and once configured correctly, you can go through the setup again.
    Need_admin_approval_o365.png

  2. Email sync suddenly stops working.
    If you have any password policies in place to make sure everybody changes their password at regular intervals, you need to update your password in both Outlook (or similar places) as well as in Membrain. 

Gmail - Troubleshooting

Membrain offers integration to Gmail users with Google Workspace Accounts. Unfortunately, private Gmail accounts can no longer successfully authenticate to Membrain. Only those Gmail accounts that are connected to a Google Workspace account can connect.

A further requirement for Google Workspace account holders is to Add Membrain to a Google Workspace Whitelist. This can be configured by your Google Workspace Administrator, and the steps on how to do this are found in the following article Allow Membrain access to Google Workspace.

Additional Considerations

Here are some additional articles from Google explaining some features that you may need to enable in order for this configuration to work.

  • Two-factor authentication
    If you have enabled this for your Gmail account, you will need to generate an application-specific password following the steps outlined on Google Support pages.
  • App-specific Passwords
    Security measures from Google mean you will also need to specifically allow access to your account from Membrain. Details about how to do this are explained on this page on app-specific passwords from Google. 

Exchange email or other services

If your email account is neither a Google Workspace nor an Office365 account, things might start to get more difficult, and techy. Grab your IT buddy and we'll go deeper!

  1. Is IMAP enabled?
    While all modern email servers can easily support IMAP, it may be disabled by default in certain circumstances. Is IMAP enabled on the email server?

  2. The TLS 1.2 requirement.
    For security reasons, Membrain requires TLS 1.2. Is your email server upgraded to support this?

  3. Do you have any form of IP filtering on your email server?
    If the email server you have specified accepts connections only from specific IPs you will need to add the Membrain server your account is on to your white list. To find the IP address of your Membrain server you can use: nslookup {your_membrain_subdomain}.membrain.com from a windows command prompt.

    Note that the IP address may change at any time, so if you can do whitelisting on a domain name level we do recommend doing that instead whenever possible.

Further Support

Is it still not working for you? That means that we have entered unknown territory, and we would like to ask you to invite your IT department to contact the support team here at Membrain on support@membrain.com so we can troubleshoot this further together.

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