How is hard bounce - category 2 determined?

[Kim_Gandy1]

Every month our team exports, archives, and deletes invalid leads from the database. This month we noticed a significant spike in invalid leads (jump from 2k to 20k leads). After looking in these more, we see a lot of leads were delivered/opened emails as recently as yesterday and are now invalid.

I know Marketo automatically marks a lead as hard bounce - category 2, if it receives a message from the receiving server that the email does not exist. However, it seems fishy that a lead was engaging in the last 24 hours and is now invalid.

Are there any other factors used to determine a category 2? Has anyone else experienced fishy invalid numbers? To avoid deleting good leads, is it possible to edit the filters before Marketo marks leads category 2 and in turn invalid?

[Grégoire_Miche2]

HI Kim,

Have these leads been marked "email invalid" = True? If so, What des the "email invalid cause" field contain?

-Greg

[Kim_Gandy1]

Pivot table of invalid causes:

550	13,933
550 5.1.1	4,754
550 5.4.1	1,024
554	314
Invalid data type in field Email Address	276
550 5.7.1	258
550 5.2.1	213
553	197
551 5.7.0	115
550 5.0.0	101
(blank)	75
554 5.7.1	72
550 5.5.0	20
553 5.3.0	18
554 5.1.2	12
550 5.4.4	10
550 5.7.0	7
no longer with company	6
511	5
554 5.1.1	4
551 5.5.1	4
554 5.4.7	2
501	2
554 5.0.0	1
552	1
505 5.5.1	1
503	1
551 5.1.3	1

[Josh_Hill13]

What is the source of these leads?

It's worth asking if Marketo had a glitch. It happens.

Are you sure they are marked as Email Invalid=T or are you looking at Email Suspended = T?

[Kim_Gandy1]

Ran a smart list for invalid email=true

Lead sources:

List import	9370
New lead	3
salesforce.com	1436
Web form fillout	29
Web page visit	30
Web service API	10566

[Kim_Gandy1]

Hi Josh Hilland Grégoire Michel, any additional notes after reviewing these numbers?

[Josh_Hill13 · Accepted solution]

Well it seems some other system poured 10k leads into Marketo  that bounced. I'd ask which system that is. Product? Website? Were you the victim of bots?

Salesforce prob means Sales is dumping leads from their rolodex or data.com. Not sure you can do much about that. I would ban that, but I know many firms will not.

List Import - only you would know these, but I'd dig into it. Events? Purchased?

The Bounced codes tell us almost nothing...they bounced...you could prob recover the ones that seem to be caused by malformed type.