Email Bounce?

[Ravi_Ansal2]

Hi Everyone,

Can you please explain me the criteria how Marketo defines email bounces,  Like which will be the soft bounce and hard bounce.

For example an email like : Bizanga@test.11 is surely a invalid email so for the first time if any trigger email is sent on this email address will that be soft bounce or hard bounce.

[SanfordWhiteman · Accepted solution]

Bizanga@test.11 is surely a invalid email

In the current real world, you happen to be right. But there's actually nothing about that email address (left-hand nor right-hand side) that is technically invalid.  It so happens there's not currently a TLD '11' but since we now have 'ninja' and so on you can't permanently rule it out.

From Marketo's perspective, email to <bizanga@test.11> will result in a Soft Bounce because it's going to get a DNS lookup failure before it even gets to connect to a destination mailserver, and in theory that DNS lookup could succeed at a later time.  I personally find this a frustrating misnomer, but it's the way the platform works.

[Ravi_Ansal2]

Hi Sanford Whiteman,

I am living in a real world but these email address don't represent any one from this world.

I was implementing a global notification and i want to rule out these type of name; I don't want my sale team to get a follow up email that DonkeyKong@zing.monkey just download an important asset from your website. Can you Please help me with this.

Thanks anyway.

[SanfordWhiteman]

In order to stop currently invalid addresses from using your form, you'd have to call out to a service (from JavaScript) that validates emails in real time before allowing the form to post.  StrikeIron has one such service, and there are number of others out there. Note that a dedicated user can still bypass any JS-based restriction and force the email into your Marketo db, but extended JS-based validation is a useful step.

An alternative (or complementary) approach is to call out from Marketo using a web hook to check validity before you send any alerts to sales reps.

Or, since you're probably sending an email to the lead first, you could trigger on the delivery of that confirmation email.

[Ravi_Ansal2]

Sanford,

I am basically relying on the delivery of the confirmation email i.e if the email is soft bounce donot trigger the notification email to sales rep

But some time there might be chance that email got bounced because of some other reason so we are slipping away that Lead.

[SanfordWhiteman]

Yes, there are many reasons why the email may have bounced -- and some of those reasons may not indicate that the lead was a bad guy.

For example, if the lead's email and/or DNS servers are down when the confirmation email goes out, that wasn't a legit lead's intent.  But real-time validation of the email address isn't any better, because when the validation service reaches out to check the email, it's going to fail for the same reason!  You really can't have it both ways.  Either you don't trust the input at all if there's anything but full success on validation, or with unknown/unknowable results, you let the lead get into your database, despite knowing it might be bad.