Adjust the soft bounce threshold.

[Anonymous]

Hi All,

I've been having issues with hard and soft bounces as I currently dont have a designated IP yet. I understand that if an email soft bounces 3 times within 3 months it becomes a hard bounce.

Is there any possibility to adjust the threshold of soft bounces before it turns to a hard bounce? Such as 6 soft bounces in one month=hard bounce?

[Anonymous]

Hi Ashely - are you referring to the smart campaign that trips the email invalid flag after x many soft bounces?

[Anonymous]

Hi Tim - I am not sure. Currently I have a nurture stream set up, and I went over the smart lists we have created and I did not find any triggers that would do that. I wasn't sure if there was a setting in the Admin menu where I could manually adjust the bounce threshold for all emails current and future that we send as opposed to one particular campaign.

[Dory_Viscoglio]

Hey Ashley, there's no inherent rule that says that "3 soft bounces = a hard bounce". If anything, it's possible that you have a rule in place that says "If email bounces soft 3 times, mark as email invalid or marketing suspended."

The easiest way to solve for this would be to find someone who has had 3 soft bounces, look through their activity log, and see if there is a smart campaign triggered by the third soft bounce that is blocking them in some way. Then you can go into that campaign and modify the criteria for eligibility.

[Anonymous]

Dory, is this what you are referring to? It looks like we sent this person an email on the 24th, where it bounced, and then the data value was changed from false to true ultimately leading to an invalid recipient?

If that is the case, this person was sent one email, therefore meaning that if an email bounces once in this program then they become invalid?

Please correct me if I am wrong.

[Dan_Stevens_]

You haven't included the column that mentions the actual campaign name:

[Dan_Stevens_]

Also, the example you provided is a "hard bounce" - not a soft bounce.

[Anonymous]

Dan,

I looked up this particular lead and it appears that they have soft bounced for the past 8 emails we have sent them...

The purpose of my questions was an attempt to explain why 2000 emails were bouncing each send as it was a clean list upon initial import. However, if we are not removing the bounced emails from the next send, could it possibly be the same 1000 emails emails bouncing?

[Dan_Stevens_ · Accepted solution]

Hi Ashley - the point we're trying to make though is that Marketo does not have any rules in place for how it handles multiple soft bounces.  It's up to you to define those smart campaigns.  For example, we have this trigger campaign that's always running in the background:

And then we always include this filter (Avanade Emailable = TRUE) as a standard filter for all email sends to ensure we don't continue to send emails to leads that continue to bounce beyond a specific threshold (which could harm your reputation/sender score).

Also, just because your list is clean, email servers can and will reject emails sent from Marketo - for a variety of reasons, including:

• your emails are being sent from an IP range that has been blacklisted on some servers
• you haven't configured SPF/DKIM properly
• some companies block ALL emails sent from Marketo (even with properly configured SPF/DKIM)

Hope this helps.

[Dory_Viscoglio]

Hey Ashley, for this specific record, the response from the recipient's server was that the email address is invalid -- so Marketo has gone ahead and marked this as Email Invalid. Marketo will do this automatically for one type of hard bounce, so that you don't continue to email them and harm your send reputation. Previously you were able to continue sending to them because they were just soft bounces. If there were 8 soft bounces, then clearly there's nothing in place to block them after 3 bounces. It just happened that this send received a different response from the recipient's email server.

Bounces can happen for a number of reasons, and it's up to you to create campaigns that will make someone unmailable after a certain number of bounces. I would assume that in your multiple sends, you're having similar people bounce each time. But the only way you'd know that, is if you exclude bounced email addresses from a future send.