Is there a way to recover emails sent to my domain-based email address while I had no domain hosting?

Question

My email address uses a domain I have registered: [e-mail]. I had web hosting associated with that domain but switched to zoho.com for email hosting (since I no longer have a website at my domain).

It took a week from the time the previous hosting service expired until I got the zoho.com hosting working. I received no email (on my Apple Mail client) during that time.

Is there any way to recover the email that was sent to me during that week?

Answer 1

Unfortunately most likely not.

Email is sent to whatever MX record is set up in your DNS. If their isn't one, a mail server will likely look for an A record before failing.

If an email can't be delivered, the email may be discarded, bounced or retried for a period of time. As each individual senders mail server makes these decisions how email is treated is outside your control. if you are lucky and the sender tried to queue your email they will retry send it and you will receive it. Unfortunately this is not likely.

Its important to note that your domain name provider will not know anything about peoples attempts to send you email, except for uselessly vague and difficult to acquire hints to mail servers which would not even identify the sender.