One of my favorite professor is a very gentle, kindhearted, and extremely-well-teaching man who wrote a recommendation letter for me back in February 10th or so. Well he is super nice to all people and is extremely skillful teacher, making him a favorite teacher to all people, but when I asked for a recommendation letter for a scholarship I could tell that his letter was very good, just by judging from how thick the sealed envelope was - probabily at least three pages, if I am not mistaken. I told him thank you right after getting his sealed letter, but have not had the chance to say thank you to him after that.
The result for scholarship came in July 30th and I found out I wasn't selected. But given the factors like: (1) the professor has a liking on me and put pretty decent amount of time for my letter, (2) I will probably ask him for another letter for grad school, and (3) I didn't get the scholarship, and (4) the date I last talked to him (about the scholarshio, in particular) was about 5 months ago, should I write an email/note telling him that I thank him for the letter and let him know of the bad outcome?
If yes, what things/how should I write such a letter to him? A rough template and/or an example letter would be great - not trying to copy but to get a sense of things
Also do you think an email is fine? I'm like over 2000 miles from the campus so if I decide to go for an actual hand writtrn thank you card, I wouldn't be able to do that until the beginning of next school year, like September 22nd or something, although an actual thank you card shows more thankfulness than an email. So I guess my second question is: would a quick email or 2-month-later hand-written thank you card be better?