How does Marketo determine an email is invalid?

[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

[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.

[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.

[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). 

[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.

[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...

[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.