Email Throttling

[aglantz71]

Hello all.

When I send an email through Marketo Engage, does it throttle the deployment, so I don't wind up dumping a ton of emails into circulation all at once and ruining my digital reputation? If there a way to verify this and possibly adjust it

Thank you very much.

Best wishes,

Adam

[aglantz71]

Content merged from duplicate post by moderator.

When I send an email through Engage, is it automatically throttled so that I can avoid the many problems that can occur when too many emails are sent too quickly? Is there a way to check and adjust this throttling...and how?

Thanks!

Adam

[SanfordWhiteman]

Content merged from duplicate post by moderator.

Other than the typical exponential backoff/retry sequence on an SMTP 4xx, no.

If you’re talking about B2B rate limits (which vary vastly across companies) you have to react to bounce message trends and reduce your daily qualified leads accordingly.

Note there is no standard way for an SMTP server communicate what the rate limit is back to the client, only that a rate limit was exceeded.

[SanfordWhiteman]

You asked this before, right?

https://nation.marketo.com/t5/product-discussions/throttle/m-p/318862#M180201

[aglantz71]

Yes, sorry for the redundancy, but I don't understand the answer, so I'm not certain I'm being clear.

To use a hypothetical example, how do I make sure that a mass email project which targets 300,000 recipients doesn't, in a single minute or two, dump 300,000 emails into circulation all at once? Such a vast quantity of emails deployed in such a small amount of time raises a red flag for many ESPs, who may spam a lot of the emails and maybe even blacklist the sender.

My preference is that, when I launch an email through Engage, only 10,000 or 20,000 etc., emails deploy each hour until the full universe is served. Is this a feature inherent in Engage, or is it something I can easily set, and how?

(I've been using the deploy at user's local time feature to limit the rate of deployment, but this isn't optimal when I'm trying to send a large file within 24 hours or so.)

Apologies again for the redundancy and for any misunderstanding. I appreciate your patience and guidance. Thanks.

Adam

[SanfordWhiteman]

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... dump 300,000 emails into circulation all at once? Such a vast quantity of emails deployed in such a small amount of time raises a red flag for many ESPs, who may spam a lot of the emails and maybe even blacklist the sender.

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“Into circulation” is a bit vague, since 300,000 connections to the same MX is very different from 300 connections to 1000 different MXs.

You also can’t compare a (largely) trusted mass sender like Marketo to, say, spinning up your own mailserver on a new IP and queueing 300,000 messages. Marketo users benefit from economies of scale. Systems that regularly send 100s of millions of messages per day with relatively few spam reports are allowed to continue that trend: that‘s part of the algorithm used by major antispam providers such as MessageLabs, Barracuda, et al.

All that said, you’re right that there are mailservers that set low enough limits that you can’t reasonably send to them using a generic Marketo send. Those limits, though, are more likely to be per day than per hour, so hourly throttling isn’t typically the answer. Marketo will retry messages for up to 24 hours in response to non-permanent SMTP errors, such as “server too busy” or “max connections” exceeded, using a standard exponential backoff algorithm (waiting longer and longer between retries to give the recipient time to breathe). Inspecting your bounces will tell you whether this logic is still stopping people from getting email. If you need to space sends out over days, use Random Sample, or a more robust webhook-based sorting method, to “curate” what you send each day.

[aglantz71]

Thank you for your quick reply. I'm afraid I'm still at the "101" level, so I didn't understand everything you wrote. What I get from your response is that if I'm sending 300,000-odd emails to different email addresses, Engage does send them all at once, but I benefit from the massive volume of emails coming from all Marketo clients through their Engage server each day, so ESPs are "used" to that.

Am I right?

Many thanks again.

Adam

[SanfordWhiteman]

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Engage does send them all at once, but I benefit from the massive volume of emails coming from all Marketo clients through their Engage server each day, so ESPs are "used" to that.

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Yes and no. It queues them all at once. No outbound mailserver is capable of transmitting unlimited messages literally at once.

It will, however, deliver them as fast as the combination of [its own local connection limits + SMTP backoff errors from remote mailservers + previously observed/cached remote limits + network-level conditions] allows.

[aglantz71]

Thank you. Again, I'm at a basic level of understanding here.

Would you please explain this in the most user-friendly way possible? 

"its own local connection limits + SMTP backoff errors from remote mailservers + previously observed/cached remote limits + network-level conditions"

I just need to know, simply and in brief, if there's some sort of throttling mechanism that will prevent my client's online reputation from being ruined each time I send a large email blast.