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Included in this article Overview Data you’ll get from Email Bounces Bounce Categories Hard Bounces Soft Bounces Bounce Details Building the Directory 1. Create 6 custom fields 2. Create a Program to house everything 3. Create a Static List 4. Create two Smart Campaigns Smart Campaign One - Logging Email Bounces with Bounce Details Smart Campaign Two - Remove Leads From the List After Successful Deliveries 5. Create Custom List View Showing Bounce Details Overview Bounce activities carry details for why the email was bounced, but it’s housed within the activity log entry, not in a field on the lead record, so it’s difficult to export that data. This article will show you how to extract that information to create a directory of leads bouncing emails and how to make the list automatically update. This will also create counters for bounces and successful re-deliveries after bounces happen. Data you’ll get from Email Bounces Bounce Categories Email bounces come in different types depending on why the email was bounced; Hard Bounces or Soft Bounces. Hard Bounces Hard Bounces come in two types, Category 1 and Category 2. Category 1 bounces are emails that have been marked as spam by the recipient mail server. Many email servers monitor blacklists or spam traps, so after de-listing with them, leads that have had a Category 1 bounce previously may be able to receive emails again. Category 2 bounces occur due to an email address that is invalid or doesn’t exist. Soft Bounces Soft Bounces come in three different types, Categories 3, 4 or 9. Category 3 bounces are usually temporary, caused by full mailboxes, timeouts, or throttling. Any email with this designation has been retried for up to 24 hours (36 for AOL). Category 4 bounces are caused by technical problems, Transient Failures, Admin Failures, DNS Failures. Any email with this designation has been retried for up to 24 hours (36 for AOL). Category 9 bounces are unknown, undetermined or gibberish details. Any email with this designation has been retried for up to 24 hours (36 for AOL). Bounce Details When an email is bounced, the recipient mail server includes details of why it was bounced. These are created by the admin of the recipient mail server and vary greatly, but most will give some explanation that can give valuable information. Email Bounce Codes Building the Directory 1. Create 6 custom fields You’ll need 6 custom fields, two DateTime fields, two Score fields, and two String fields Name the DateTime fields “Bounce Date” and “Email Delivered After Bounce”. Name the Score fields “Email Bounces” and “Deliveries After Bounces” Name the String fields “Email Bounce Details” and “Email Bounce Category” Directions for creating Custom Fields can be found here: Create a Custom Field in Marketo 2. Create a Program to house everything Use a default program type and name it "Directory of Leads Bouncing Emails". Info on creating programs can be found here: Create a Program 3. Create a Static List This static list will be your actual directory that contains all of the leads that are currently bouncing emails. Name it "Active Bounce List". Info on creating a static list can be found here: Create a Static List 4. Create two Smart Campaigns These two Smart Campaigns are what will be used to add and remove leads from your active bounce list. Info on creating Smart Campaigns can be found here: Create a New Smart Campaign Smart Campaign One - Logging Email Bounces with Bounce Details Your first Smart Campaign will be used to listen for any email bounces that occur. The campaign will populate the “Bounce Date”, “Email Bounce Category” and “Email Bounce Details” fields. It will then add one point to the “Email Bounces” score field which can be used to count how many bounces have occurred per lead. Lastly, the campaign will add the lead to the static list which will be an active directory of leads who are bouncing emails. Campaign Smart List Use the two triggers of “Email Bounces” and “Email Bounces Soft” in the Smart List. Set both triggers to “is any” so that they will fire whenever any email bounces for any reason. Campaign Flow The Flow of the campaign will have 5 flow steps. The flow will use a System Token and some Trigger Tokens, which can be used to pull details out of the action that activated the trigger. In this case, the Trigger Tokens will be pulling out the details on why the emails were bounced. That info is in the bounce message and is logged in the lead's activity log. Normally you'd have to comb through the activity log one at a time to find these details for each individual lead. This method, however, will pull the details out automatically for all leads. Flow Step 1: Change Data Value Attribute: “Bounce Date” New Value: {{system.dateTime}} Flow Step 2: Change Data Value. Attribute: “Email Bounce Category” New Value: {{trigger.category}} Flow Step 3: Change Data Value Attribute: “Email Bounce Details” New Value: {{trigger.details}} Flow Step 4: Change Score Score Name: “Email Bounces” Change: +1 Flow Step 5: Add to List List Name: “Active Bounce List” Smart Campaign Two - Remove Leads From the List After Successful Deliveries Campaign Smart List The Smart List of the campaign will need a trigger for “Email is Delivered” set to “is any” and also a filter of “Member of List” looking just for leads that belong to your Static List. This way, the campaign will only apply to leads who have had an email bounce but have then had an email successfully delivered afterwards. Campaign Flow The Flow of the campaign will have 3 flow steps to do the following; log when the email was delivered, add a point to the "Deliveries After Bounce" Score Field, and remove the lead from the "Active Bounce List". Flow Step 1: Change Data Value Attribute: “Email Delivered After Bounce” New Value: {{system.dateTime}} Flow Step 2: Change Score Score Name: “Deliveries After Bounces” Change: +1 Flow Step 3: Remove from List List Name: Operational.Active Bounce List 5. Create Custom List View Showing Bounce Details The custom fields you’ve created for email bounce information won’t show automatically in the view of your list. You can create a new view of the list to show just this information so that when it is exported it will give you only the email bounce information you need. Once the list has the necessary details, it can be exported with those columns included so that you can work with it. You can identify emerging trends and issues with your deliverability by looking for common themes among the bounce details. Directions for creating Custom Views can be found here

Issue You have a lead that is marked as Email Suspended and you are not sure whether they can receive Marketo emails or not. Solution When emails bounce as spam, the lead that bounced is set to "Email Suspended." "Email Suspended" is a historical field. A more accurate name for this field would probably be "This email was suspended at some point in its history." The actual suspension only lasts 24 hours. To see if the lead is currently suspended, check the timestamp on the 'Email Suspended' field. If it is more than 24 hours ago, the lead is not currently suspended and can receive email from your Marketo instance. However, the "Email Suspended" flag will remain on the lead record for the purposes of future troubleshooting. It is not possible to set "Email Suspended" to "false" once it has been set to "true." The "Email Suspended Cause" field will provide the bounce message associated with the most recent spam bounce.

Issue Issue in delivering Marketo Email (especially for mimecast users). Email get bounced with Error: 550 Rejected by header based Anti-Spoofing policy Solution This error can happen if: You have not properly white listed the Marketo IPs You have an issue with DKIM/SPF set up and configuration Please whitelist the set of Marketo IPs found in the doc below and make sure SPF and DKIM are set up correctly for your email domain https://experienceleague.adobe.com/docs/marketo/using/getting-started-with-marketo/setup/configure-protocols-for-marketo.html?lang=en#step-allowlist-marketo-ips

Issue You would like to understand the difference between "Send email" and "Delivered email" activity. Solution Send email activity confirms that the email which you have sent has been dispatched from Marketo to be delivered. Delivered email activity is recorded when the recipient email server responds that the email has been accepted for delivery. Delivered email activity doesn't actually mean that email has been delivered to lead's email inbox. For more information on what happens to the email once it reaches the recipient email server, check out this blog post: https://nation.marketo.com/community/support_solutions/blog/2016/02/26/between-the-delivery-and-the-inbox-what-happens.

Abuse Report An abuse report is when an email recipient forwards a complaint directly to abuse@marketo.com. Marketo’s Privacy and Compliance Team processes all complaints to these addresses and will unsubscribe the complainer when possible. Feedback Loop Complaint A feedback loop complaint is when an ISP forwards the complaints that originate from their users. For example, when someone clicks the SPAM or JUNK button in their email client. ISPs that offer FBLs expect that subscribers like Marketo will mark the complainer as unsubscribed in the original database. Marketo does process FBL complaints and marks the email address as unsubscribed. Additional Information: Feedback Loops (FBL) Abuse Report Deep Dive Finding Leads that are Auto Unsubscribed for Email Spam Complaints / Feedback Loop (FBL)

Issue You see that a lead has an unusually high amount of Clicked Link activity for a particular email after delivery. Solution There can be a couple reasons for this. If you see that all links in the email are being clicked immediately upon delivery, it is likely that the lead's email security software is link-testing to guard against phishing or malicious links. However, if you see an unusually large number of link clicks over the course of a day or two, it may be that the lead forwarded the email to other people who clicked on the links. Since the tracking links are specific to the lead who was sent the original email, if the email is forwarded to other people, their clicks will be recorded under the initial lead's activity history. Marketo does not have a way to confirm this is the case, but if you open the Click Link activities in the leads Activity Log and look at the details, you may see the User Agent (which indicates the operating system and client software used to display the email) is different for each click. If you see a variety of different user agents in the details, it is likely the email is being opened and clicked by different people who were forwarded the email.

No, if you have received the blacklist notification, you are not blocked from sending mail. You can continue to mail while you work through the remediation steps. The only time we will ever block you from sending mail is if you trigger a listing at Spamhaus, the world’s most respected and widely used blacklist. If this happens, you will receive a call or email to let you know what’s going on and we will work with you to resolve the issue. This is a rare occurrence. Additional Resources: Can you give me the spam trap address that triggered the listing? What is a spamtrap, or spam trap, and why does it matter? What is a blacklist? How does Marketo respond to blacklisting and spam notifications? Top blacklists - What you need to know Blacklist Remediation Successful Reconfirmation

Summary You have set up a campaign or campaigns in the Email Deliverability Tool (250ok), but there is no engagement metric showing Total opens and Unique opens, which should be available in the ‘Engagement Overview’ in the Email Deliverability tool. You would need to ensure that you have configured the necessary setup for the tracking to work in the Email Deliverability tool. Issue Campaigns created in the Email Deliverability tool (250ok) doesn’t show any engagement overview metric such as total opens and unique opens. Environment Email Deliverability tool (Production/Sandbox) Solution You would need to implement the necessary setup for the metric to show in the Engagement Overview in the Email Deliverability tool (250ok) Follow the steps below to ensure you have configured the setup for campaign tracking. 1. Ensure your DNS CNAME is configured. (All that is required is creating a CNAME DNS entry on this domain that points to 250analytics.com) For more information, you can refer to this external documentation: https://www.validity.com/knowledge-base/what-are-custom-domains-in-250ok-analytics/ 2. Insert the correct tracking pixel code retrieved from the Email Deliverability tool. 3. Always utilizing the ‘c=‘ tag in your tracking code for your campaigns to ensure the tracking is measured correctly in the Email Deliverability tool. (Obviously, the CNAME above is essential to have it set up correctly). You can follow a guide on how to implement the ‘c=‘ tag and retrieve the tracking pixel is here: https://help.returnpath.com/hc/en-us/articles/360046308092-How-Do-I-Add-My-250ok-Tracking-Pixel- Once you have all these configuration settings, you can start tracking your campaigns which are sent via Marketo in the Email Deliverability > Engagement Overview. Root Cause Mis-configuration or no configuration made causing the campaign tracking does not work.

When a customer triggers a blacklisting on Marketo's shared IP range that customer is moved to a set of IPs we call the quarantined IP range. We do this to protect the health of our shared network and ensure the best deliverability possible for all of our customers on that network. If you have received a Blacklist Notification from Marketo reporting that you have triggered a blacklisting your Marketo account is now in the quarantined IP range. While you are in the quarantined range it is possible that you may experience a slight decrease in your deliverability rates. The reason for this is that you are now sending from a range made up of senders that have also caused other blacklist issues. All customers have received a notice of the listing and are in the process of repairing their database. There are two ways to be removed from the quarantined IP range: Follow the steps outlined in our Blacklist Remediation article. Be sure to fill out the form referenced in the email alert to indicate that you have taken steps to mitigate the issue. Demonstrate clean sending behavior for 3 months. We remove senders from the quarantined IP range if they have not triggered any new listings in 3 months. To ensure your best deliverability rates blacklist issues should be addressed right away to prevent further damage to your sending reputation. Furthermore, if no action is taken to improve list hygiene the issue will likely recur. Marketo's Privacy Team strongly recommend following the Blacklist Remediation steps. Additional Resources: Blacklist Deep Dive

Unfortunately, we can only provide you with whatever information the blacklist provided to us. This information should all be included in the notification email you received from us. If that notification did not contain any information about the email campaign that triggered the blacklist issue, please contact Support. Additional Resources: Can you give me the spam trap address that triggered the listing? What is a spamtrap, or spam trap, and why does it matter? What is a blacklist? How does Marketo respond to blacklisting and spam notifications? Top blacklists - What you need to know Blacklist Remediation Successful Reconfirmation

What is a Blocklist? Can I Still Send My Emails, or Are You Blocking Me from Sending? What Is a Spamtrap and Why Do They Matter? Can You Give Me the Spam Trap Address That Triggered the Blocklist So I Can Remove It from My Database? Can You Give Me More Information regarding the Blocklist Issue? What Is the Quarantined IP Range? I Sent This Email Campaign a While Ago. Why Am I Only Getting Notification of the Blocklist Issue Now, and Am I Still Blocklisted? The Blocklist Notification Went to the Wrong Email Address. Why Was It Sent to That Address? Which blocklists should I be concerned about? - Top Blocklists – What You Need to Know How do blocklist issues get resolved? What steps do I need to take to resolve the blocklist issue? - Blocklist Remediation

When using Marketo it is not a requirement to set up DNS text records for SPF and DKIM. However, Marketo recommends setting up SPF and DKIM because it improves the deliverability of your mailings. Configuring and implementing one or both of these records is a way to verify that the server sending your mail is authorized to do so. If a recipient domain is configured to check for SPF and/or DKIM and those DNS records are available and your mail passes the SPF/DKIM check, it further reinforces its good reputation. Not implementing SPF/DKIM records does not add to or subtract from its reputation, it’s just not there. Please note, not all domains check for SPF/DKIM and if this is the case, again, the presence of these records does not add or subtract from your mail’s deliverability. There is no negative effect to setting up these records, and it can improve your deliverability. It is for these reasons that Marketo recommends setting up these DNS records and configuring their use in your instance of Marketo. For more information on how to set up and configure SPF/DKIM, please read our KB article here.

Quick points: *Spamtraps are addresses owned by antispam organizations *Emailing a spamtrap (usually) gets your IP or domain blacklisted *Maintain current, direct opt-in with an active lead database to avoid this What is a spam trap or spamtrap? A spam trap, or spamtrap is an email address secretly owned by an antispam organization that is used to detect spam. Antispam organizations do not sign up for mailing lists, so they consider any email sent to these addresses to be spam. Once email is sent to the spamtrap, the antispam organization that owns this address will blacklist the IP that sent the email (or, less often, domains that are linked in the message). Email administrators purchase subscriptions to various blacklists, and use the lists to block all incoming email from listed IPs or containing listed domains. From the marketer’s perspective, this can mean a high number of bounced emails leading to low lead engagement, and ultimately to weak revenue performance. There are two types of spamtraps – pristine traps, and repurposed/recycled traps. A pristine trap is an email address that was never used by a person. A repurposed trap is an email address that once belonged to someone but is no longer a valid address; these addresses will bounce as bad addresses for at least six months before an antispam organization will turn them into live traps.< How can a spamtrap get into my Marketo lead database? Purchased data Purchased data is unreliable. The antispam world does not like the use of purchased data so antispam administrators have made a concerted effort to get spamtrap addresses into the databases of data vendors. While data vendors may say they provide opt-in data in reality consent should be direct to your company./p> Sending unsolicited email is prohibited by the Marketo Terms of Use because this practice has a high risk of causing blacklist issues that can destroy deliverability for multiple Marketo customers. To avoid spam traps get direct opt-in before sending email. If you have purchased data in the past we recommend setting any inactive purchased leads to marketing suspended or simply removing them from your database. Old data Repurposed traps are email addresses that were once valid but are now owned by an antispam organization. This can happen when a company goes out of business; expired domains are often purchased by antispam organizations. Sometimes a company that has a direct partnership with an antispam organization will allow email addresses of former employees or users to become spamtraps. Because antispam organizations will generally make sure future spam traps return a bounce as bad addresses for at least six months before they become spam traps you can prevent repurposed traps in your database by emailing remaining engaged with everyone in your database at least once every six months. Avoid “wake the dead” campaigns to addresses you have not contacted in more than six months. Unconfirmed form entries People can unintentionally enter spamtrap addresses into forms either by making a typo or by intentionally using a fake email address that happens to be a spamtrap. If you use single opt-in, you may add spamtraps to your mailing list. This is more likely to happen if you are a B2C company or if someone thinks they can get whitepapers or free trials simply by filling out a form with made-up information. How can I identify spamtrap addresses? Spamtrap addresses are considered trade secrets by the antispam organizations. They do not share these addresses because their goal is for senders to change their mailing practices rather than to simply remove spamtraps from their mailing lists. That said, one thing we do know about spamtraps is that they tend to be automated processes and do not engage. Spamtraps do not click links. You can use smart list filters to identify inactive leads in Marketo. How can I prevent spamtraps in my database? Maintain active, direct opt-in for all leads. Don’t purchase data. (To grow your list, sponsor events, use list rental services that send the first message for you, or use co-branded content that sends you only good leads) Email everyone you want to email at least once every six months Don’t add old data directly to your mailing list. (If you need to, add in small batches and send a welcome email with a slightly different subject to each batch.) Regularly clean your database of inactive leads Grant access to assets such as free trials and whitepapers as email links to discourage intentional use of fake email addresses on forms Use scripting on your forms to identify potential typos

Issue Emails with valid email address get soft bounced with this error: Local address contains control or whitespace. Solution This error means that the email has a space somewhere in the the From email address or there was a comma or extra character in the From line. If you do not see a space inside the email address, check the end of the address to see if a space somehow got added at the end. The email send did not occur due to the error with the address. The emails will need to be resent once after the associated address is corrected with white spaces or extra characters. Also, there is the possibility that email address "text" contains Paragraph marks or hidden formatting symbols (https://www.computerhope.com/jargon/f/formmark.htm) and instance users will required to have it reviewed and changed.

Issue You want to recall emails sent from your Marketo instance. Solution Once an email has been sent from Marketo Servers it cannot be recalled or pulled back. You can cancel a program before it sends at its scheduled time using the steps here: https://docs.marketo.com/display/public/DOCS/Abort+Email+Program The above cancellation only works on Email Programs. If you are wanting to cancel a smart campaign follow these instructions: https://docs.marketo.com/display/public/DOCS/Abort+a+Smart+Campaign Note: A smart campaign will only stop what hasn't been run yet. If you already had 100 emails sent by the time you cancel it, those 100 emails cannot be unsent. You may see in your Outlook an option for "Recall Email." This function within Outlook only works with internal sends/private systems where the client can request the server revoke access to other client mailboxes before they're viewed, such as your office email to other users in the same company.

When someone emails abuse@marketo.com to tell Marketo that they received unsolicited email from one of our customers, the result is called an abuse report. Instead of just hitting the “Report Spam” button, someone actually took the time to write to our abuse@marketo.com address and explain to us that they never wanted email from the sender. Because of this direct complaint we take these types of spam reports very seriously. Only about 10% of our customers ever receive any abuse reports at all so it is cause for investigation if you receive one. If you receive notification that someone filed an abuse report against your account review your list management practices. Below are some things to consider: When people sign up to receive emails from you, is it made clear to them that they are giving you permission to email them? Have you recently added any new leads or lead sources? Have you recently added older leads to your database that you have not reached out to in the past 6 months or more? Was there anything about the campaign that was complained about that makes it different from previous campaigns? In most cases people file these kinds of reports because: They never requested to be on your email list. They did request to be on your email list at some point but have forgotten because they have not heard from you in so long. The importance of using explicit opt-in in your list building efforts cannot be stressed enough. You should also send to active leads consistently enough that they continue to expect emails from you. The best ways to avoid complaint driven reputation issues is to send to opted-in, engaged recipients. To help with this, a lot of senders clear out their inactive leads every 6 months or so. An inactive lead is a contact that has taken no action in the given time period— they haven't opened an email, clicked a link, visited your webpage, attended a Webinar, and so forth. Inactive leads are a dangerous group to continue mailing to because their behavior proves that they do not want to interact with your mail and will likely complain to Marketo or to their ISPs about it. We have a great resource on how to create a Smart List to remove inactive leads here. If you still need some help, please feel free to reach out to our Support team (support@marketo.com). Additional resources: Abuse Report Deep Dive Blacklist Deep Dive

Issue You see a soft bounce on a lead and in the details you see it show System send failure: Reply-To address parse error (value of the address) Solution Confirm the tokens you are using are for the proper field and that the value for the field is an email address. The parse error occurs when we cannot generate or create a proper email address in the From Email or the Reply To Email fields. The error will show in the parenthesis the value we tried to put in.. For example Service Department is in the parenthesis, this would be an example of a incorrect field being used.

Issue How to re-subscribe records who are already unsubscribed. Solution Once the person is willing to resubscribe to receive your emails, either of the following can be done: Smart Campaign: Change Data Value of "unsubscribed" to false.You can either use a Smart Campaign to execute this flow or can just go with single flow action ( select the lead, Person actions > Marketing > Change Data value; Attribute: Unsubscribed, New Value: False.) You can manually change unsubscribe from True to False. To do this, go to Lead database, click on the lead ( whom you need to unsubscribe), go to lead Info tab, look for unsubscribe field , remove the tick or check off the unsubscribe field checkbox.

Any emails being sent as part of 'Forward to Friend' will create that user as a new lead (provided that the lead does not already exist in Marketo). When leads are created in Marketo via the 'Forward to Friend' feature, Marketo automatically unsubscribes the lead records in order to protect our global customers from anti-spam laws. This is because a lead being sent a forwarded email doesn't qualify as opting in to a mailing list and also prevents them from getting any other emails by accident.

Issue Issue Description An email was sent to leads but immediately returned an 'Email Bounced Soft' Activity Type with the Activity Details stating: 'Details: Empty address: []' Solution Issue Resolution This is due to a token used in the 'From Address' Field in the Email editor that does not have a valid value or valid default value. For example: {{lead.Partner Email:default=edit me}} The Record's field value for 'Partner Email' is Empty. As there is no value for the record the token would use the default value 'edit me' which is not a valid value. A valid value must be an email string format such as mark@eto.com

Knowledgebase

Maintaining a Directory of Leads Bouncing Emails

How the Email Suspended Field Works

550 Rejected by Header Based Anti-spoofing Policy

The Difference between “Send Email” and “Delivered Email”

What Is the Difference between an Abuse Report and a Feedback Loop Complaint?

Lead Record Shows an Unusually Large Number of Link Clicks for an Email

Can I Still Send My Emails, or Are You Blocking Me from Sending?

Email With Email CC Isn't Sending to Some CC Recipients

Email Deliverability Tool - Campaigns Not Being Tracked

What Is the Quarantined IP Range?

Can You Give Me More Information regarding the Blacklist Issue?

Blocklists: Frequently Asked Questions

What Are the Possible Effects of Not Setting Up SPF/DKIM Records?

What Is a Spamtrap and Why Do They Matter?

Soft Bounce: Local Address Contains Control or Whitespace

Can an Email Be Recalled?

Abuse Reports: What They Are and How to Avoid Them

Soft Bounce “System Send Failure Reply-To Address Parse Error”

How to Re-subscribe a Lead

Unsubscribed Occurs When ‘Forward to Friend’ Email Is Received

Email Bounced Soft With Details 'Empty address: []'