The Grade Grinder returns grade reports to students and instructors using email. The sending and delivery of email is a cooperative process that involves both the sender, in this case the Grade Grinder, the receiver and possibly many computers connected by the network in between. Because of the distributed nature of email delivery, there are many things that can go wrong, not all of them under our, or your, control.

When you make a submission, Submit sends your grade report by email to your registered email address. This email normally arrives a short period of time after successfully making a submission. If you do not receive your grade report in a timely fashion, you should

1. First check that the email address that you have entered into Submit is correct . This is always important, but most likely to cause problems if this is your first submission. In this case we will associate your registration id with the email address that you give, and attempt to send email to that address. For all subsequent submissions, we check that the registration id and email address match what we have on file, and so we can detect spelling errors.

   If you discover that you have spelled your email address incorrectly, and it is your first submission, then visit our Email Address Change Page where you will be able to correct your mistake.

2. You can use the status button on Submit's main screen to determine whether the Grade Grinder has finished processing your report. If your information is filled in correctly, and Grade Grinder is processing a request for you, it will report this in the status message.

3. If the Grade Grinder has completed the grading of your submission, then next check to see if your email program has filtered the grade report into a Junk Mail box. Most email programs do this, and most learn how to recognize junk mail over time (which means that a message from the Grade Grinder might not be consider junk mail one day, and may be the next.)

   If this happens, you can usually tell the filter that a message is not to be considered junk. Many spam filters assume that mail from people whose addresses are in your address book is not spam. So you might be able to convince the filter that the message is not spam by adding the addresses gg@gg1.gradegrinder.net, gg@gg2.gradegrinder.net to your address book.

4. If you're still looking for your mail, you might like to try sending an email to yourself at the given address. If that is unsuccessful, then you may receive a “bounce” message which will help you to determine and correct the problem. if this happens, then the problem is not with the Grade Grinder, but you will need to resolve the issue locally. Chances are that you will never receive the grade report so you will need to resubmit your work.

   Mail delivery systems sometimes try quite hard to deliver your mail. In some cases, usually when the network or receiving computer is unavailable, it may be several hours before the system gives up and returns your message. Many issue a warning after four hours have elapsed but keep trying beyond that time period. Immediate non-receipt of a “bounce” message is not an indication that all is well.

5. If the Grade Grinder receives a bounce message resulting from your submission, it may attempt to tell you by “flagging” your account. If it does this, future attempts to make a submission will be blocked until you reassure the Grade Grinder that the problem has been resolved. You can only do this by changing your email address at our Email Address Change Page.

   Sometimes this "change" will involve saying that the correct address is the one already on record (if, for example, you were over quota, and have now resolved the problem.) However, you shouldn't assume that simply re-asserting your existing email address without taking other action will solve the problem. Your account will simply be flagged again if the problem preventing the delivery of mail persists.

6. If you're reading this far, the situation is pretty dire. If you're sure that your email address is correct, and that you're not filtering our mail as spam, and you can receive messages from yourself and you have tried unflagging your account (or it has not been flagged), then the remaining possibilities are not good, and most solutions are out of your and our direct control.

   One thing that is happening increasingly often is that Internet Service Providers (including university and college campuses) are implementing site-wide junk mail filtering. So if your ISP is filtering or rejecting mail from the Grade Grinder then you will have to determine that this is the case and try to prevent it.

   If this happens, and we are (manually) able to detect it, Submit will give you a message to this effect when you try to make a submission. This would serve as confirmation that this is what is happening. You might also check with your fellow students (using the same ISP) to see if they are also having problems.

7. Finally, there is the possibility that some computer or network between the Grade Grinder is unavailable. For example, if your campus mail server is down, or off the network, then you will not be able to receive mail -- again this will have widespread effects. Note that if it is a computer further from your campus, perhaps a machine from which your campus server receives mail, that is impacted, you might still be able to receive mail from within campus, or from some remote hosts but not from others.

   In cases like this you should contact your local network or mail administrators.