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 make there way directly to the inbox almost all of the time, there will be instances where you are contacted by an applicant or recommender who claims that a message was not received.  In some cases, the message may be routed to a junk mail folder; in other cases, it may be trapped by an institutional or corporate mail filter.  In yet other cases, the message may, in fact, be routed to the inbox but the recommender inadvertently or purposefully deletes it.  (This is evidenced by the fact that often when recommenders claim to have not received a message it is registered as "opened" in our systems, indicating that the message was looked at.)

In situations where the recommender claims that he or she is not receiving the message, we recommend that you go to the student's record within Slate, click on the line item for the recommendation and select "Send Email Link" to send the email via your local email client such as Outlook.

Simply sending the message from your individual email account and through another email server can improve the deliverability in these anomalous situations.