Someone sent you mail, but you haven't received it. Other email is arriving. Here are some possible reasons:

• Is it in your Spam or Junkmail folder? Have a look, and do a search for the missing mail. This is the quickest thing to do.

• Do you have any email filters / message rules / blocked senders in your email program? Could these possibly affect the sender?

• Check that you really are receiving other messages.

• Is the sender able to send to other people?

• It's still on the way. Email does not get there instantly. A small message sometimes arrives in a few seconds, but an email with files attached can take hours. Sometimes even major ISP's mailservers have failures or backlogs, which can add days.

If the sender has attached files, but doesn't know how big they are, this is a likely reason for the delay. Ask them to send a small email with no files attached, and see how long that takes to arrive.

• It was sent to a wrong email address. No matter how careful you are when telling someone your email address, they can still type it wrong. One way to deal with this is for you to send the other person an email - then all they have to do is click reply.

If this has happened, probably the sender will get a failure notice back in their inbox. Ask them, and if they did, get them to read it. This will explain what went wrong. If it doesn't mean anything to them, they should pass it to an IT person who should be able to decipher it.

• If nothing here helps, if you're a Riv WE customer, you're welcome to call us. And we're going to ask all the above questions.