Need Detailed Email Bounce Reports

[Alok_Ramsisaria]

I recently started reviewing email deliverability for my campaigns and realised that a major % if going in soft bounces. Now, I know soft bounces can occur due to multiple reasons but would be great in MKTO allows to create a report to review these reasons.
As a way around, here's what I did to see why email soft bounce reasons:
- Create a custom text string field as 'Email Soft Bounce Reason'
- Create a webhook which reads the lead activity log for a lead and picks the soft bounce reason.
- Schedule a recurring campaign every night to run this and record email soft bounce reasons.
- Build a report using this field for monitoring these on a weekly basis.

[Josh_Hill13]

Why not just add Email Bounced Reason and other fields to a View so you can handle it right in Marketo?

A quick google search provides the list of bounce codes.

[Anonymous]

Josh,

Are you sure Soft Bounces are recorded in the Email Bounced Reason field right away?

In our case those fields are blank on verified soft bounce records.

I think the message only gets recorded in those fields after max retries has occurred at which point i believe it becomes email invalid as well.

[Mike_Reynolds2]

I just wrote this Support Solution, should give you what you're looking for. Maintaining a Directory of Leads Bouncing Emails

[Anonymous]

Thanks Mike, this looks very useful. One question though, we encounter the scenario of email is sent, delivered and then bounced (as described in this idea: Under what circumstances can an email be delivered and bounced? ). Does your solution know how to support this?

[Mike_Reynolds2]

Itay Billet,

The out of bounds bounces (like what is also described here Re: What does "550 internal oob The recipient is invalid" mean ? ...... Hard Bounce / Soft Bounce ? ) happen when there is first a delivery message returned, and then a bounce message returned.

When the out of bounds bounces occur, it happens when the recipient mail server first returns the message that the email was delivered successfully and then afterwards returns the message that it was bounced. This actually works out in our favor regarding the process described in Maintaining a Directory of Leads Bouncing Emails. That solution will add leads to a static list when a bounce message is received, and then remove leads from that list once a successful delivery message is received.

So in this circumstance, since the successful delivery message is received first, that campaign in that solution wouldn't trigger on that initial report of a successful delivery. But, then afterwards, that's when the bounce message is received. The bounce message is what triggers the campaign and adds the leads to the list. If the successful delivery message were received second, it would throw it off because that would pull them off of the list, but since the bounce message comes in second, it will keep them on that list of leads bouncing emails.

Now, let's say you send an email to the same lead again later. They're already on the list of leads that bounced an email before. And let's say the email does the exact same out of bound thing again where the message of successful delivery is received right before it then gets a bounce message back (the same out of bounds behavior). Well in that case, the successful delivery message activates the second campaign to pull the lead off of the static list. The bounce message returned later will activate the first campaign to put the lead right back onto the static list again. But, the problem here is that in the second campaign, you've got a score field keeping track of successful deliveries after  bounces. This out of bounds behavior will throw it off because even though all emails are being bounced, it will trick it into thinking it was a successful delivery later on, so it's score will go up and give false info on how often it's actually taking emails in. It's unpredictable because it's all up to the recipient mail server.