Email Delivered Email Soft Bounced Not Making Sense

[Anonymous]

We recently launched our first email campaign through Marketo, and I'm a little conufsed by the results report I downloaded from the program control panel. I see 2155 emails sent and delivered, with 511 soft bounces. However, in every instance of the soft bounces, that email address was previously logged as having the email delivered. So for instance, recipient xxxx@domain.com has the following activities logged:

• Send Email - 2014-06-06 11:00:07
• Email Delivered - 2014-06-09 11:01:13
• Email Bounced Soft - 2014-06-09 11:02:28

What would cause the email to first be logged as delivered and then moments later logged as soft bounced? 

[Anonymous]

A soft bounce can be considered a 'delivered' because it's basically sitting in email purgatory, waiting for your recipients to white label it. A really easy way to decrease soft bounces is to include an "add us to your address book" which will basically mark you as an approved sender. 

Are you using your own IP or a Marketo IP? Considering this is your first email campaign, give your reporting (and reciepients' email addresses) some time to adjust. If it is your own IP, it can take some time to build a 'reputation' if you will. If it's Marketo's you should be doing well. 

I would also recommend an opt-in/opt-out preferences page. That tends to help build your overall IP reputation, especially internationally (and considering Canada's new laws). 

Hope that helps. 

[Kiersti_Esparz1 · Accepted solution]

Courtney,
The behavior you are describing is related to "out of band" bounce processing.  This is not the standard way most email receivers process mail and it displays as having delivered and THEN bounced.  This is because the mail server accepted the email initially and sent Marketo an "delivered" status notice.  Then after processing the email the mail server determined it could not deliver the email and then returned a bounce.  Because Marketo recieved two seperate events related to the delivery you will also see both.

Most email networks determine whether the email address is deliverable before accepting the message so in the event of a bounce we only receive the failure and not the "delivered" status notice too.

The Soft Bounce status means that the message was not delivered for what may be a temporary reason.

Thank you,
Kiersti

Manager, Deliverability and Privacy Team