Send the same email (with variable tags) twice to the same contact?

[Cube84_Developm]

We have a scenario where we are trying to automate the renewal notification process by sending emails to the billing contacts of the opportunities that are due for renewal. In some cases the billing contact is the same for multiple accounts and hence the same for the opportunities. In this scenario, I would like to send two emails to this contact; one for each account. How can I achieve this in Marketo?

Any quick help is greatly appreciated.

[Devraj_Grewal]

I would move this discussion to Products​.

Is the billing contact just one contact in SFDC? If it's two different contacts, one for each account, then you can send the same email to the contact and it's company name can be tokened to distinguish them.

[SanfordWhiteman]

Hmm, remember how Marketo deals with duplicates within the same batch: if two leads with the same email address qualify, only one of them (the oldest one) gets the email.  This will work in a trigger scenario, however.

[Andy_Varshneya1]

I assume a running scheduled batch based on renewal date should handle this just fine unless the two contracts also have the same renewal date in which case they'll only get that 1 email.

Simple solution (though maybe not ideal depending on your perspective): modify the two emails slightly by using a "+" sign so that you fool Marketo into thinking they're different email addresses e.g. person+account1@company.com and person+account2@company.com.

[SanfordWhiteman]

Yes, the 2 (or more) in the same batch is the problem case.

I don't understand how adding "+" serves as a solution: those *are* different addresses, they don't fool Marketo. You might be thinking that "+" always is a subaddress, but it's not. That's an Exim thing supported by Gmail. Not by al mailservers.

[Andy_Varshneya1]

I've been able to send myself 4-5 copies of the same email in the same batch by having a few copies of my email address in Marketo differentiated by the "+" mechanism (e.g. avarshneya+test1@, avarshneya+test2@, etc), so I would think that applies to this situation as well, where you're able to send that same email address the same email with different token data based on the account the person is a part of.

[SanfordWhiteman]

Send yourself one of those emails and check the SMTP recipient. If the rcpt contains the "+" then your mailserver supports "plus addressing". This is not standard and can't be used for unknown domains.  It's a form of automated alias generation but the mailbox (left-hand-side) of the email is indeed different.

[SanfordWhiteman]

Observe:

Like I noted above, the reason Marketo treats +test1 and +test2 as different addresses is that they are in fact different.

This doesn't mean the recipient (without the plus sign) is able to receive mail at these made-up addresses. If their mailserver doesn't support automatically-generated aliases (as is the case with the server whose log is shown above) the mail will bounce.

[Andy_Varshneya1]

What do you know, you learn something new everyday.

Is it common that mail clients don't support these aliases? I read somewhere that a large portion of them do, including Google, sendmail, and Communigate, all support the plus sign.

[SanfordWhiteman]

Not a client thing but server side... Exchange doesn't support subaddresses (maybe there's a 3rd-party extension that does, but you couldn't count on it being installed).

The question isn't just whether subaddresses can be authorized/created by the receiver, but whether a sender can make up subaddresses and have them just work. For example, Ipswitch IMail (for which I built an email validation library long ago, thus my familiarity) supported subaddresses using "-". But they had to refer to extant subfolder names within the mailbox, or else they'd be rejected (which makes sense, as otherwise you're letting senders create folders for you!). Gmail is generous in automatically creating subaddresses at the sender's request.

Anyway, point is you can't count on support. FBEmail can tell you if a lead uses Google as their MX, which is a hint.