Slate delivers hundreds of millions of email messages each year using a distributed network of email delivery servers.  These servers maintain an individual IP reputation of 97-100 (on a 100-point scale), which is higher than the mail servers used by Gmail, Yahoo, and most email service providers.

While these messages do make their way directly to the recipient’s inbox almost all of the time, there will always be instances when an applicant or recommender claims that a message was not received.  In some cases, the message may have been routed to a junk mail folder; in other cases, it may have been trapped by an institutional or corporate mail filter.  In yet other cases, the message may, in fact, have been routed to the recipient’s inbox but the recommender inadvertently or purposefully overlooked or deleted it.  (This is evidenced by the fact that our system often registers a message as “open” even though the intended recipient claims to have not received it. See the article on Email Open and Click Tracking for more information about how the “open” status is set in our system.)

If you have determined that you need to resend a recommendation request message, you can take the following steps to do so:

1. Open the applicant’s Person Record in your Slate database.

2. Click on the tab for the appropriate Application.

3. Under Checklist, find the checklist item for the recommendation that needs to be resent. The recommender’s name should appear within parentheses in the title of the checklist item. Select the checklist item to open up detailed information about the message, including the date it was originally sent and the email address it was sent to. We recommend confirming the email address with the recommender before resending it.

4. Select Send Email Link from the details section for the checklist item. This will allow you to send the email via your local email client (such as Microsoft Outlook).

In situations where the message is having difficulty getting through to the recipient’s inbox, you can often improve the deliverability of the message by simply sending it from your individual email account in this way.