How does Marketo determine an email is invalid?

[John_Danielson1]

I recently started looking at bounced email addresses we have in our instance and have come across several email addresses that appear to be valid email addresses. I know the email addresses are valid because we have recruiters who have regular email interactions with these people using their own work email addresses. I also sent out an email to a handful of leads that have been marked invalid to see if any bounce back to me and got nothing, leading me to believe the email addresses are actually valid and accepting emails.

- How does Marketo decide when to mark an email invalid? Looking in the activity history of some of these, I'll see "Send Email" immediately followed by "Email Bounced" with Invalid Email switched to "True" shortly after that. In some of the cases there were previous emails that had been delivered and a week later a 2nd email bounced and the lead gets marked invalid.

My concern is that Marketo is marking valid email addresses as invalid. There are other post on this subject, but I wasn't able to find a good answer. Is this an issue others have faced, and, if so, how did you handle it?

JD

[Anonymous]

We have the same issue. I have a record that is marked as an invalid recipient. However, the contact owner is able to communicate with this person via another sending platform.

We recently ran into a problem with contacts who use Symantec. We did a little research and came across this article on Symantec's website. I am not sure how new this is as part of their AntiSpam service, but it is clearly calling out Marketo sending servers. It just seems to be getting harder and harder to send using tools like Marketo to even communicate with our clients who are subscribed to receive communications. I have notified Marketo support about this and they have pushed it to the deliverability team. Looking forward to what they come up with.

[Robb_Barrett]

Here's a great example of one that happened IRL.  One of my Product Managers asked why his contact didn't get invited to a webinar.  I looked at the record and saw this:

"Exceeded MaxAttempts - 554 5.7.1 <(removing)@(removed).org>: Recipient address rejected: User not registered with ContentCatcher"

But we had an email from this guy with that same email address just sent to us, which I took to mean that his email server was blocking us.  He checked and sure enough, that was the case.  Here's what he found:

His email system knew it was from Marketo and just blocked it.  He was able to then whitelist the email.

At GE, we have the same system in place that just blocks bulk emails.  Here's a sneak-peek. This doesn't even make it to Outlook, GE blocks it and has it in a hidden area that you have to know about to find it. Ultimately, a lot of companies don't want their employees reading spam, attending webinars and looking at buying products or reading newsletters when they should be working.

[Mike_Donnelly]

Excellent points and examples Robb.  One thing to add here is sending to multiple people within the same domain the same message (i.e. bulk) can trigger the SPAM system as well.  For example if I'm sending a webinar invite to 10 people at xyz.com and Marketo delivers them all around the same time, some SPAM filters don't care that it came from Marketo, but rather that it's clearly bulk email and will block or put them into a specified folder.  Throttling email delivery is one way of getting around this and in essence trick the system.

[SanfordWhiteman]

When you're using a shared Marketo IP and you don't subscribe to the branded sender add-on, mail from other Marketo instances has the same source IP and envelope sender domain. Merely staggering mail from a single instance does not have any impact on the overall rate seen by the remote server.

The silliness of most throttling approaches in high-volume MA environments is their assumption that enterprises have strict moment-to-moment limits in place but loose daily limits  Thus the claim that limits can be thwarted by distributing massive amounts of mail over the course of a day. Nope. As an enterprise mail admin for years (including right now) I can assure you that if our limit is 1000 emails from a given IP address, that's per day. There may also be per-second and per-minute limits for load shedding, but if you want to send me 8000 emails it's going to take you 8 days. The only way around this is to get whitelisted into a higher-volume tier -- not by IP, but these days we will only whitelist by DKIM signature.

[Mike_Donnelly]

Excellent points Sanford.  That's exactly why I typically recommend distributing deliveries across the week if you can get away with it.  This obviously depends on your content schedule and a number of other factors.  As you know, every email system is unique, so the more you can be a "good citizen" email sender, the higher chance you have of inboxing and getting your message across.

[Dan_Stevens_]

This is hugely important as well, Mike.  Thus the reason for this discussion topic: Re: Now that ABM is such a large focus for many marketers, how are you effectively emailing everyone...

[Dan_Stevens_]

Thanks for sharing, Robb.  This has become a huge challenge for us in the B2B space.  Many are even questioning the effectiveness of using Marketo for email - and instead focus on other channels, like events, paid advertising, etc. (although even Events has an email component - but what some are suggesting is to have the sales execs send these out themselves). 

[SanfordWhiteman]

Like Robb says, mailservers are free to use any fatal (5xx) error code they want. They don't have to be truthful in the description if they don't like the sender and/or sender's server.

Another edge case in which 5.5.0 can be accurate, but confusing, is when a recipient is redirecting mail to a remote address and that (2nd-hop) address does not exist. Mailservers which have the horsepower to check the remote address in real-time, or which remember that the remote server has been throwing 5.5.0s in the recent past, will send you a synthetic failure because in practice they can't accept mail for that mailbox.

[Grégoire_Miche2]

Hi John,

Marketo determines an email is invalid in various ways:

• When the lead is created, if the email format is not correct
• When email is hard bounced, which is the case you are mentioning here.

But it can also come from smart campaigns that flag the "email invalid" field.

What is the email invalid cause"?

Please look at the activity log and provide the details (screenshot) of the "email Bounced" activity and that of the "email invalid"

-Greg

[Anonymous]

Hi Gregoire

When I look at a lead activity, I can see that Marketo is defining a particular email address (example: name@abd) as invalid but no fields are being set to email = invalid or something like that so we can add them to an exclusion list.

Is this expected behavior? If so what can I do not add those leads to a list for exclusions purposes?

Thanks

Axel

[Grégoire_Miche2]

Hi Axel,

There is a Marketo system field called "invalid email". It is used by the system smart list 'Bounced email addresses'. It's a checkbox field.

-Greg

[Anonymous]

Hi Gregoire

Thanks for that.

It is my understanding that the invalid email field only gets populated when an email is sent to the invalid email address. It is not checked when the record is created in Marketo although Marketo already knows is it invalid as it tell us that. See image below:

Marketo will exclude those from send but I am trying to exclude them form our target audience so we know the exact number will be receiving an email.

Hope this makes sense

Thanks

Axel

[Grégoire_Miche2]

HI again Axel,

Marketo may also flag the email invalid field if the lead / contact is created from the CRM with an invalid (ill formatted) value.

And you may also setup some smart campaign that process bounces with codes other than 550 and flag them.

-Greg

[John_Danielson1]

Hi Greg

We don't have any smart campaigns that would flag that field.

When I look in the activity history of the majority of these leads, I do not see any activity for when Marketo marked the email invalid and provided the invalid cause. It just shows "Send Email" and "Email Bounced":

And then I can see Email Invalid and Cause under Lead Info:

Invalid cause says: 550-5.1.1 The email account that you tried to reach does not exist. Please try 550-5.1.1 double-checking the recipient's email address for typos or 550-5.1.1 unnecessary spaces. Learn more at 550 5.1.1 http://support.google.com/mail/bin/answer.py?answer=6

I am aware that company emails often become invalid when someone leaves, so I have strictly been looking at gmail and yahoo addresses. I see leads that have been receiving emails from us for months and all of the sudden one bounces and it becomes invalid.

[Robb_Barrett]

I am aware that company emails often become invalid when someone leaves, so I have strictly been looking at gmail and yahoo addresses. I see leads that have been receiving emails from us for months and all of the sudden one bounces and it becomes invalid.

This is where having a non-identifiable email address comes in handy.  Send an email to that desired address from a personal email and see if it bounces or not.  I have about 10 email addresses....my wife was very curious about them at first until I explained that I work in email marketing and need them for numerous reasons, including testing (yeah.....testing.....).

There are a few things you can do to improve deliverability but at the end of the day every email system out there knows that the email came from Marketo, not you personally, and may have different ways of dealing with marketing automation tools. This is where DKIM / SPF / DMARC help you out a bit.  It's also possible that people gave you bogus email addresses by removing a character or two from their autofilled email address to eliminate spam. My email address is robb.barrett but I can remove one of any of my double consonants and the email looks valid but could fail.

In my opinion, you should be very conservative in who you email. If Marketo doesn't like the address for some reason or another I'd tend to believe what Marketo is suggesting unless you can prove there's a bug, in which case work through support.

[Trinity_Levens3]

Robb hilarious!  Yeah...testing  

[Josh_Hill13]

Marketo handles this in various scenarios. I wrote about this specific item in my Guide and I believe Marketo finally documented Email Suspended.

• Some types of Bounces result in Email Suspended, which is a system field.
  • This holds the person's email for 24 hours with Email Suspended=T. This field does not revert even if the lead is released.
• Some types of bounces result in Email Invalid=T
• Many other types of bounces result in no action taken by Marketo
  • this is where you get to decide how to handle this. I've written about this a lot on the forum.

[Robb_Barrett]

(you forgot the screenshot)

[Grégoire_Miche2]

Hi Robb,

I am asking for it

-Greg

[Robb_Barrett]

An invalid email is one that received a 5XX bounce code, which usually means that the email is no longer valid. Yes, they look perfectly valid but let's say it's a work email address and the person left the company and now their email is disabled - it fits the schema of the email addresses but it'll get rejected. The company's email server will send back a special kind of machine-to-machine message stating the bounce code error.

One thing to remember is that bounce code reasons are set by the company, so while the number might be the same the reason syntax might be different.

If you look at this list: https://marketingtechblog.com/soft-hard-email-bounce-codes/   you'll see Hard and Soft bounces, the codes and a basic definition.