• To check whether HQ has sent an email, take a look in the Sent Items folder.
• If you look there immediately after you’ve sent an email, you will see it queuing to go out. The email will have a red timer icon at this stage.
• Once the status changes then HQ has successfully exchanged the email with a remote email server. This is absolute confirmation that the email has been sent from HQ.

There could be a number of reasons why an email isn’t received by a recipient. It could be that:

• It was sent to the wrong address and that person didn’t exist. You should subsequently receive a ‘bounce back’ message.
• It was sent to the wrong address and that person did exist. The email is therefore lost.
• Your email was blocked by a spam-blocker. This is very common.
• Your email is still on its way. Sometimes emails can take hours to arrive.
• One of the servers around the world handling this email has malfunctioned but this is rare.

If the email was blocked by a spam-blocker it could be for any one of these reasons:

• Your email server has found its way onto a spam list. The recipient machine looks at spam lists when deciding whether to accept inbound emails. This is quite possible if your email server is used by many different organisations.
• The recipient’s spam checker takes objection to your embedded picture. Try deleting embedded graphics.
• The recipient’s SPAM checker doesn’t like your style of English. It ‘thinks’ it looks like SPAM).
• To overcome Spam-blocking, ask the recipient to add your email address to their ‘allowed’ list on his/her SPAM system