delivery not attempted message expired

[Katie_DenHollan]

I received this message in the Activity Details for several people who soft bounced a recent email "554 5.4.5 [internal] Delivery not attempted (message expired)".

Does anyone know what that means? Did I do something wrong? Does Marketo keep trying to send the email?

This happened to a lot of people on this email, and I don't know how to explain this because I know I will get questions.

Thanks!

[Edward_Masson]

Marketo will try to resend emails when soft bounce until they get any invalid information.
Best to create a support ticket to see if you have an error on your instance.

[Edward_Masson]

did you have a complex smart list with multiple filters when launching your email?

[Dory_Viscoglio]

Hi Katie, you might take a look at this help article on bounces. Also, this thread has a great article on analyzing email deliverability. 

[Josh_Hill13]

Marketo stops attempting a send after 24 hours. That's probably what that means.

[Katie_DenHollan]

Thanks for the replies!

Edward, I did not have a complex smart list, just that a lead was in a SFDC campaign with a particular status. I did do an A/B test with this email though. It was the first one I have done, so maybe that has something to do with it, but it would seem strange to me if that were the case.

Thanks Dory, I did see that article, but it didn't address the issue I am having. The thread also didn't help with this specific issue, but was very insightful!

[Anonymous]

Hi Katie, Did you ever resolve this? We just sent out our first live campaign through Marketo and are getting ~90% soft bounces with the same error message. We noticed that most of the email addressess that have bounced are from a particular domain. 

[Katie_DenHollan · Accepted solution]

Hi Stephanie,

I ended up contacting Marketo support and they told me it basically means that the server we were trying to deliver to was not accepting emails at the time and so it "soft bounced" it. Marketo continues to try again after the first attempt about an hour later, then about two hours later, and so on until approximately 36 hours have passed. Marketo then marks the email as "soft bounced" from pending in your results and records that message in the activity log details.

She said we could try resending since sometimes a receiving server is throttling email at the time although it may just consider this as spam based on past emails to leads on that domain who have marked your emails as spam.

She also recommended creating a smart list to identify if certain leads are chronically soft bouncing and evaluate if we want to continue to try to send to those addresses or delete those leads.

For example:
smart list
filter: email bounced soft > minimum number of times (depends on your frequency of sending) > in past x months.

[Anonymous]

Hi Katie, If we choose to send again and they may have marked us as spam, would that put us in jepordy of being blacklisted? Can I see if a server blocked us and why? If an email is soft bounced then gets delivered, does it mark it as a soft bounce and delivered? Did support also tell you how many emails until the "warm up" period is over? I've been sending tests to a group of employees over the span of two months. This past eblast was for about 600 people. Is there a certain quota marketo makes you meet to be taken out of this warm up period? Thank you!

[Katie_DenHollan]

I think it could put you in jeaopardy of being blacklisted, which is a risk of re-sending. I don't think there is a way to tell from a soft-bounce if you have been blocked from a server, you may have to contact the company itself to find out.

All she told me was that they re-try for 36 hours.

I'm not sure what you mean by warm-up period.

I'm definitely not an expert on this as we just implemented Marketo about 7 months ago and are still learning a lot about it all. 🙂