Email Invalid - How long does it take for MKTO to flag this?

[Lucas_Metherall]

Hi all,

Unfortunately, the org. I work for manually processes the data we collect in MKTO before transferring it to our CRM. We are using MKTO forms for petition signing, and a Thank You email from MKTO, and want to take the valid emails out of MKTO for our CRM.

Question - I just ran a test entry using @gnail.con email address, to test how long it would take MKTO to flag that it's an invalid email address, or even bounce. I thought it would be near instant, given the TY email that is sent automatically would surely go nowhere..

I need to find a way of allowing MKTO the time to figure out the bad emails from the good, before I hand over the form-fill data to the data team to import into the CRM.

Any tips? Thanks everyone 🙂

[MitchellH]

Hi Lucas, my Marketo instance generally records a bounce within 30 seconds or so of the email being sent:

In this case the "Email Invalid" flag was set to "true" in just over a minute after email was sent. This may vary though. (I have some other bounce management campaigns set up that you may not, but the setting of the flag should be automatic for most types of bounces)

[SanfordWhiteman]

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records a bounce within 30 seconds or so of the email being sent

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This is correct for hard bounces, where there's authoritative information that the email is invalid. Not for DNS-related soft bounces. See my answer above.

[SanfordWhiteman · Accepted solution]

You chose a domain that doesn't exist in DNS, i.e. NXDOMAIN.

Marketo will retry on NXDOMAIN for 24h (spacing out attempts) until finally a Soft Bounce. So kind of a bad example!

Some situations you think of as "sure thing" address-level bounces are in fact up to the sender to retry. What Marketo does is not the most common approach, but it's not without precedent.

[Lucas_Metherall]

Thanks Sanford.

I see how it's a bad example to test invalid marking speed by MKTO. What we are seeing though is a lot of these happening in the forms, so it's still an issue we have to contend with.

Importantly, you said it takes MKTO 24 hrs of trying to register a soft-bounce if the domain does not exist, which formed part of my question - how much time does MKTO need to figure out if an email is not data worth keeping.

For our processes, if I set up lists for our data team that have waited 24hrs before exporting, real invalids and these non-existent domain addresses will be marked as such.

[SanfordWhiteman]

The Soft Bounce from NXDOMAIN won't mark someone as Email Invalid automatically.

The case to consider is when someone's DNS servers are temporarily misconfigured. A general judgment as to whether a given mailbox is not supposed to be able to get mail isn't possible in that case. Obviously it would be rare for an outage to be going on at the same moment someone fills out a form, but not it's impossible; if a company is having trouble receving inbound mail, that doesn't stop employees from filling out forms. If the DNS is fixed within 24h the email will still go through.