Email Delivery — Secretary Guide
What to do when an exhibitor reports they didn't get an email from HARES (check-in sheets, results, sign-in links, etc.).
📌 The 30-second version
- Tell every exhibitor to add [email protected] to their email contacts before you send anything important. This single step prevents most problems.
- Yahoo, AOL, and Comcast exhibitors are the most likely to have problems. If they don't get an email, use the download button (↓ icon next to the envelope) on their row to grab the PDF, then forward it from your personal email.
- This will keep getting better over time as more legitimate exhibitors engage with our emails and our sender reputation builds.
Why does this happen?
Every email service (Gmail, Yahoo, AOL, Comcast, Outlook, …) runs spam filters on incoming mail. When a brand-new sender like haresregistry.com first starts sending email, the bigger providers don't know us yet and treat us as suspicious by default — especially the older, more conservative providers like Yahoo, AOL, and Comcast.
The technical term is sender reputation. As more real exhibitors receive our emails, open them, click links, and reply, our reputation with each provider climbs. The first few weeks of any new service are the hardest; after that, deliverability stabilizes and most emails just land in the inbox like you'd expect.
Until then, two things help: the recipient explicitly trusting us (the contacts trick below), and you having a manual fallback when an email really won't get through.
What to tell your exhibitors
Copy-paste this into your show announcement, your Facebook post, your welcome email — wherever your exhibitors hear from you:
"Before our entry deadline, please add [email protected] to your email contacts. Our registration system (HARES) sends check-in sheets, sign-in links, and results from that address, and some email providers (especially Yahoo, AOL, and Comcast) will filter our emails to spam if you haven't added us first. If you don't see something you were expecting from HARES, please check your spam / junk / bulk folders."
When an exhibitor reports they didn't get an email
Walk through these in order:
- Ask them to check spam / junk / bulk folders. AOL has a separate "Bulk" folder distinct from "Spam." Yahoo, Outlook, and Gmail all have spam folders. If they find it, ask them to click "Not Spam" — this is the strongest signal to the provider that we're a legitimate sender for that recipient.
- Ask them to add [email protected] to their contacts. Most providers will whitelist mail from anyone in your contacts list.
- Wait an hour and try again. Many providers (especially Yahoo) defer messages from new senders, then deliver them an hour or two later. The "Send" button worked on our side; the recipient's provider is queuing.
- If it still hasn't arrived, use the manual download. On the Exhibitors panel of the show, find their row. Next to the envelope icon (Email Check-in Sheet) is a down-arrow download icon. Click it → the check-in sheet PDF opens in a new tab. Save it, then attach it to a normal email from your personal Gmail (or whatever) to the exhibitor. Your personal Gmail talking to their Yahoo will deliver in seconds because Gmail has reputation Yahoo trusts.
- As a last resort, ask for a different email address. A Gmail or Outlook address is much more reliable than Yahoo / AOL / Comcast right now.
Providers ranked, easy → hard
- Gmail — usually delivers fine.
- Outlook / Hotmail / Live — usually delivers; occasionally caches in junk for a day before promoting.
- iCloud / Me / Mac — generally fine.
- Comcast / Xfinity — moderate filtering. Adding contacts helps a lot.
- AOL — aggressive. Silent drops common. Adding contacts is almost required.
- Yahoo — most aggressive of the legacy providers. May defer for hours, occasionally drops. Same Apollo/Yahoo back-end as AOL.
What you don't need to worry about
- The Send button itself. When you click "Email check-in sheet" and the page confirms, the email genuinely went out from our side. Anything that happens after is on the recipient's provider.
- Suppression on our side. If a recipient's address ever actually bounces (the email account doesn't exist), our system automatically stops sending to that address to protect our reputation. A real bounce is rare; soft filtering by Yahoo/AOL/Comcast is the common case and we don't suppress for those.
Questions or running into something this page doesn't cover? [email protected].