Issue with "reply to's" not working.

[Anonymous]

When we send an email to a client from Marketo, their replies back are not coming through to us. The reply to address is an internal email. We have whitelisted all Marketo IP's with no luck.

[Grégoire_Miche2]

Hi George,

To get a chance to have an answer to your question, you should post it to "Products", not to "Champions". Read here: Getting the most of the community when you have a Marketo question

What email address have you set in the "reply to" field when designing the email? This is the address that receives the reply to. And it has to be a valid email address.

-Greg

[Anonymous]

Greg,

Thanks for the info.

The email address is a valid email. For example, the from is "devon.dykstra@matthews.com" and the rely-to is "devon.dykstra@matthews.com". When an external client is replying to this email the reply is not coming back to Devon. Any thoughts on what might be causing this?

George

[SydneyMulligan]

I have found that the "reply-to" field is not reliable across different email browsers. Not all of them acknowledge the "reply-to" field, and just use the from field. I have seen this particularly in Outlook.

[Andy_Varshneya1]

Right, but it looks like both the from and reply-to are the same.

George Hoffmann​ can you confirm if the people trying to reply back are getting a bounce notification?

[Anonymous]

No bounce notification was sent.

I had our hosting server, Rackspace, clear all of our our white-lists then re white-list all of Marketo IP's. They did this 3 times and eventually we started receiving replies back into our inbox. Thanks for your help.

I am curious as to what started this problem. We switched to a new instance of Marketo a week and a half ago, which I believe was the cause, but from my understanding, this would not change the IP's that Marketo emails are coming from. Any advice would be appreciated to prevent this from happening in the future.

Thanks!

[Grégoire_Miche2]

Hi George,

If you have switched your Marketo instance, are you sure you have updated the dkim & spf entries in your DNS? The Marketo IP have not changed, but these 2 have.

Now, the fact that you do not receive the reply to emails should not be linked to Marketo IP addresses, since these reply-to are not sent by Marketo but by your leads' own email servers.

-Greg

[Anonymous]

Greg,

Yes, we had updated the SPF/DKIM entries in our DNS. However, it was a different domain then our old instance.

Would this new domain have something to do with it?

George

[SanfordWhiteman]

I think you're confusing the directions of mail flow and the significance of each DNS entry.

DKIM is used to authenticate outbound mail content.  If Marketo is signing your email using DKIM, then you must have a corresponding and correct TXT record for m1._domainkey.example.com, or else all Marketo email should be expected to fail. On the other hand, if Marketo is not signing your email using DKIM, then the absence of a DKIM entry in DNS will not in itself be a fatal problem, but your emails will lack the extra oomph of being signed that can help them get through spam filters.

SPF grants permission to outbound mail servers to send mail with an envelope sender -- not the same as the From or Reply-To header -- @example.com.  SPF is not required for Marketo-generated emails unless you are specifically paying for Marketo's branded sender service. Otherwise, the envelope sender is not @example.com (where example.com is your domain) so SPF has no significance. Worse, attempting to add Marketo to a complex SPF record can make the whole SPF record unusable.  (See http://blog.teknkl.com/your-marketo-spf-entry-doesnt-matter-unless-youre-paying-extra/​ and http://blog.teknkl.com/third-marketo-users-broken-spf/​.)

Neither SPF nor DKIM is consulted when messages are sent to your domain but your domain does not appear in the From, Reply-To, nor envelope info -- as when leads click Reply or compose a new message to you.

The DNS MX record for your domain specifies which inbound mail servers process mail for your domain and forward inbound mail to end-user inboxes.

As Greg pointedly mentions, Marketo IP addresses cannot be involved in inbound mail to your domain (except for those messages that originate from Marketo, i.e. internal addresses that are CC'd on marketing email).