Hard bounced vs invalid e-mail

[Anonymous]

Hello Marketo Community,

After sending an email, I wanted to remove all leads for which a hard bounce occured.

To check how many emails I had to remove, I used the "email invalid" filter.

To double check, I also tried with "Email Bounced", setting the one email I had previously sent.

The filters give different results. I thought that if a hard bounce occured, the email was automatically set as "invalid". It seems to sometimes be the case but not always.

=> The question is: when a hard bounce occurs, why do the e-mails not always get marked as invalid?

Thanks a lot for your help!

[John_Clark1]

Hi Claire,

An email can hard bounce for a number of reasons, and they don't all mean that the email address is invalid.  Sometimes the receiving server just isn't available.

Whether or not an email address gets marked invalid depends on the response we get from the receiving server.  If that server says that the email address no longer exists, or that it won't ever accept emails from Marketo, then it will be marked invalid.

John

[Anonymous]

Thanks a lot for your answer John!

I inferred that all hard bounces became marked as "Email invalid" from this page in the Help section: Hard and Soft Bounces in Email - Marketo Docs - Product Docs ("Email Invalid - Set to True when a hard bounce occurs.")

It does make more sense not to set it as invalid each time though.

Claire

[John_Clark1]

Thanks for pointing out that article Claire.  I'll make a note for our docs team to take another look at it.

John

[Steven_Vanderb3]

We do have two types of categories that we use to evaluate the bounces.  A Category 1 will set the lead to be Email Suspended temporarily and usually relates to a Spam block.  A Category 2 will mean the email address is truly invalid and we will mark the lead as such.  You can add Categories as an additional constraint on the bounce Smart List filters to check for this.

[Anonymous]

May I please recommend a most excellent article contributed by Mike Reynolds for 1) the different categories of bounces and 2) a systematic way to record and manage them

Maintaining a Directory of Leads Bouncing Emails

[Anonymous]

Also, the whole issue of "blacklists" comes into play. Even if every email address you have was requested and opted-in, the recipient's IT department may have inserted a "blacklist" filter between us and the recipients. For a very good article about this, may I please recommend

Top Blacklists - What you need to know