States across the country have run into problems establishing and running hotlines to collect tips on child abuse. In Pennsylvania, the state auditor general announced in 2016 that 42,000 calls to a child abuse hotline had gone unanswered the previous year, and that some callers had waited as long as 27 minutes to speak to someone on the phone. The auditor general, Eugene DePasquale, said lawmakers had lowered the bar for reporting suspected child abuse without providing funds for additional hotline workers to handle calls.

In 2013, the administration of Gov. Jan Brewer of Arizona was widely criticized after it came to light that more than 6,000 tips about child abuse and neglect had been marked as not worthy of investigation over a period of four years. Ms. Brewer had taken credit for overhauling the state’s hotline to give priority to the most urgent cases, but critics said the overhaul amounted to systematically throwing thousands of reports in the electronic dustbin.

Creating one place to report all child welfare concerns in Colorado was intended to be an improvement. Before 2015, tracking child abuse was left solely to Colorado’s 64 counties, which range from sprawling, urban Denver with more than 600,000 residents to mountainous San Juan County with only about 700. Practices varied widely from county to county, and often left gaps that endangered children.

Over several years, The Denver Post published a sustained campaign of articles exposing failures in the state’s child protective services, and in 2015, the State Legislature responded by setting up and publicizing the statewide hotline, among other measures.

Those efforts have paid off, according to Becky Miller Updike, director of the Rocky Mountain Children’s Law Center. She said that despite the email error, the state had generally seen steady improvements in detecting and intervening in child abuse.

“Lost emails are certainly a concern, but the hotline got over 222,000 calls in 2018, so I think people are still able to get through,” she said.

According to the state’s Human Services department, those calls led to social services agencies investigating the safety of more than 57,000 children last year.