HELP! 788,000 Marketo emails shut down my system!

[Anonymous]

I am running an email campaign that consists of multiple email assets, landing pages, forms. I have a about 53 pages on my company website that is associated to live alerts within this campaign. (It's been running since July by the way).

Last Thursday I made some changes to the alerts to remove all anonymous visitors from the smart list and set it to run nightly at 8pm.

Once the system kicked off, it sent approximately 788,000 emails to each of the 4 team members and completely shut down our internal email systems. Once we realized what was happening, we deactivated the campaigns, removed the emails from the flow step, shut down my microsoft email (I'm listed as a sender) and even blogged all related subject lines from our server.

Marketo responded with the following:

I see that this campaign has been deactivated, so no new leads have qualified and gone through the flow since just after 1pm Central time yesterday. I do see that the campaign was set up such that leads can go through the flow each time they qualify for the triggered smart list (anytime they visit one of the matching pages listed there), so an alert would be sent each and every time. There is not a very high number of matching activities, however; a total of only 572 emails would have been sent through this campaign to each individual email address listed in the Send Alert flow step.

Has anyone encountered this issue? We still are unable to pinpoint the issue and management has requested we not use Marketo until the cause is identified. I need to provide a root cause analysis but I do not even know where to start! Any suggestions or direction is greatly appreciated. Far fetched or not.

HELP!

[Josh_Hill13 · Accepted solution]

This happened to me a long time ago where we changed a form flow (not in Marketo) and it dumped 40k email alerts on my colleague. We stopped it and had to ask IT to fix his email box. sounds like you are already at that stage.

Unless I can see the exact smart list (before and after) and your flow, then I cannot help much. I suspect, as Marketo says, that because the flow was Every Time and because it is likely your campaign was triggered on something like web page visit and you may have actually triggered Anonymous=T, this was the problem.

Your smart list does not usually have to exclude Is Anonymous=F because Marketo won't send an email in most cases. If you instead set it to trigger on Is Anonymous=T, then Marketo will definitely go nuts in most cases.

[Anonymous]

Josh you're basically right! It was an error in the smart list. Instead of saying Web page and non anonymous visitor the filter was set to Webpage OR non anonymous visitor. So essentially, an alert was created for every lead record in our database. We've since implemented some countermeasures to ensure this doesn't happen again...mainly checking each other's work.

Thanks for your input!