Ideas, Questions and Comments RE: Email Suspended, Bounce, Bounce Soft, Marketing Suspended and Unsubscribed fields.

[Anonymous]

Hoping for a lively discussion regarding this group of fields - please add anything you think is important.

Email Suspended, Email Bounce, Email Bounce Soft, Marketing Suspended and Unsubscribed

Observations, Questions, Comments and Requests for Consideration

Here is a little background - I find working with the above fields and product documentation is not detailed enough and they seem have inconsistencies or gaps that make getting a handle on subject harder than it needs to be.

Sample Doc

Hard and Soft Bounces in Email - Marketo Docs - Product Docs

There are 5 lead strings in Marketo that are related to troubled email delivery.

1. Email Suspended - Set to True when a soft bounce occurs. This does not get automatically reset.
2. Email Suspended Cause - There can be many reasons. This field tries to explain the cause.
3. Email Suspended At - When a soft bounce occurs, Marketo will suspend mailing the lead for 24 hours from this timestamp.
4. Email Invalid - Set to True when a hard bounce occurs.
5. Email Invalid Cause - The reason for the hard bounce.

Here are my questions starting with the Email Suspend fields:

Currently, Marketo determines what response codes are classified as Email Suspended.  Marketo sets the Email Suspended Field to TRUE and sets the suspend time as 24 hours on behalf of all clients. 

• Please help me understand why Marketo does not reset the Email Suspended Field (after 24 hours have passed) to either NULL or False on behalf of all clients?
• Why am I asking? Marketo sets all three Email Suspended fields on behalf of clients.  The Email Suspended is a temporary status that last for 24 hours, as defined by Marketo. When the 24 hour period expires, it seems that this Marketo system field would be updated to reflect the current status of the record.  I do not understand why this is not done. 
• Some problems that this creates -
  • The Email Suspend field never stops growing. 
  • The Email Suspend field is not fully searchable like Email Bounced and Email Bounce Soft - see below.
  • If a customer has Marketable Segment (Default) / Non-Marketable Segment where one of the criteria set Email Suspend = True
    • Instead of marking the currently Email Suspended records as Non-Marketable
    • Today this criteria will eliminate any record ever marked Email Suspended.
    • In our case, currently Email Suspended (within the last 24 hours) is 84
    • Whereas Email Suspended equals True = 300,222

Another observation:

The Email Bounced and Email Bounce Soft are fully searchable

The Email Suspended fields are not fully searchable.

• Why can't users search in the same ways as Email Bounced Soft and Email Bounced?
• Due to the gray nature of Email Suspended Cause field, the lack of current rules and definitions.  And no real clear definition of the differences between the Email Suspension Cause field and the Email Bounce Soft field, I would argue that the current limitations on the three Email Suspended fields dramatically limit the ability of customers to search, target, and manage some of the most important data received from an email send.

I have adopted a work around to try an remove Hard Bounces that show up in the Email Suspended Cause field for the following text. If any are found, the email is marked invalid.

Here my current list of search terms to find hard bounces hidden in the Email Suspended Cause field

access denied	no unauthenticated relaying	rejecting
Bad email	non-existent	requires server authentication
blacklisted	not allowed	source blocked
blocked	not authenticated	unable to verify destination address
connection refused	not available	unauthenticated mail
email bad	permanent failure	unavailable
error	prohibited	unknown address
invalid	recipient address rejected	unknown recipient
invalid address	recipient invalid	unknown user
invalid recipient	recipient not	user address
invalid user	recipient rejected	user invalid
Mailbox unavailable	recipient unknown	user not
message refused	refused	user unknown
no longer	reject	verification failed
no such	rejected	virus

Other Observations and Random Thoughts

• How do bounces with the words included above get in the Email Suspended Field and not go directly to Email Bounced?
• Can Marketo define and provide the rules and documentation around what error messages qualify for Email Suspend? 
• Can Marketo define and provide the rules and documentation around what error messages qualify as Email Bounce Soft?
• For clarity, consistency and industry convention please consider RENAMING the Email Bounced field To Email Bounced Hard. 
  • This will align with Email Bounced Soft.
  • It will also eliminate the confusion of users as expressed by the repeated questions in the Community.
• For the Email Bounced field - and all the other Marketo fields that have constraints please provide the full documentation for all constraints.  Example: category, sub-category, details, email address and test variant.
• For consistency, the Email Invalid needs a timestamp field, please consider ADDING Email Invalid At (date field) and have it populate on all changes
• For consistency, the Marketing Suspended also needs needs a timestamp field, please consider ADDING Email Invalid At (date field) and have it populate on all changes
• For consistency, the Unsubscribe field also needs needs a timestamp field, please consider ADDING Email Invalid At (date field) and have it populate on all changes

Looking forward to hearing the Community's thoughts.

Eric

[Josh_Hill13]

Eric,

You can post some of these as Ideas to get Marketo to act.

• Email Suspended - I do not know why this isn't technically cleared since Marketo just ignores it after 24 hours.
• Unsubscribed Date/Suspended Date/ etc  - you can add your own field and workflow to do this.
• Documentation - you can see my docs here: Marketo Email Reputation Management you can also do a search - there was a great  breakdown of some of these codes on here the other day. there is also a directory on other sites, but I cannot post those links here.
• Search Terms - very helpful, thank you.
• Reason Codes - not every server provides this back to Marketo.
• Email Bounced vs. Bounced Soft. Sure, it'd be nice to rename to Hard, but most people know the difference now on this system.

[Josh_Hill13]

Here are some recent links to the documents I mentioned.

Making sense of Marketo email bounce categories

Monitoring Email Deliverability: Troubleshooting High Bounce Rates – Part III

[Anonymous]

RE: Email suspended not clearing -- so that you know that it happened and when (at least the most recent occurrence)

[Dan_Stevens_]

There is no timestamp field for Email Suspended - therefore, unless we search in the activity log, we won't know when this happened.  I too find it very odd/confusing that this field isn't reset after 24 hours.