Invalid Email Addresses Showing as Soft Bounces

[Anonymous]

I'm looking to not only clean up my bounce lists but also create a prompt for our sales team to reach out to leads with invalid email addresses.

Problem is...many bad email addresses are soft bouncing instead of hard bouncing and not being marked invalid. It obviously makes them difficult to find.

Examples: yahooo.com, gmail.co, myowncompany.com

Does anyone know why these wouldn't be marked as invalid or why they'd only be soft bouncing?

Besides removing them from sends to avoid a higher bounce rate (the easy, inefficient fix), I'd love to be able to effectively create alerts so sales can fix the contact info.

In order to do that, I need a reliable way of creating a list of bad email addresses. Email Invalid doesn't seem to be doing it.

[Anonymous]

I usually open a case when I notice batches of improperly flagged bounces.  Since there's not much standardization of smtp response codes, some services response codes don't match the majority of other services, and exceptions need to be made to flag them appropriately.

[Anonymous]

Zachary,

You may want to see my guide on this which describes in detail what Marketo does. If Marketo is doing it wrong, then yes, raise a Case.

http://www.slideshare.net/jdavidhill/marketo-email-reputation-management

You should be able to use some of the suggestions I had to modify your smart lists to trigger alerts on possible bad emails like @gmali.com, etc. so they can be fixed quickly.

[Anonymous]

I created a smart campaign to handle this situation.  The smart list uses the Sales Email Bounces and Email Bounces triggers with a "Constraint of Details contains [any of the key words/pharses below]".  The smart list also includes the Email Invalid: false filter.  The flow has two Change Data Value flow actions for Email Invalid and Email Invalid Cause.  I ususally pick up about 100 more invalid emails as a result of this and it seems to be pretty accurate.

invalid recipient
recipient invalid
recipient not
recipient unknown
unknown recipient
recipient rejected
User address
user invalid
user not
invalid user
user unknown
unknown user
invalid address
Unknown address
Unable to verify destination address
Recipient address rejected
Mailbox unavailable
no such
no longer
Non-existent
Bad

[Anonymous]

Awesome list - thanks, Elliott!

I caught some extras by changing "recipient address rejected" to just "address rejected", and I also added "DNS error" to the list, which picked up a ton more bad emails.

What I'm doing is marking these as invalid immediately, and then I keep a list of the most recent ones so I can run through and do any possible manual fixes.

Very helpful.

[Anonymous]

Thanks for the feedback Zachary - I will change to "address rejected" in my smart list.  Are you sure you won't get a bunch of false positives with "DNS error"?

[Anonymous]

Definitely not sure, so I'd love to hear if you have more on why that might return false positives. I'd rather not block people that don't need to be blocked.

I dug into it a little this morning. The vast majority of our DNS Error soft bounces continue to bounce on future emails. I ran a list of leads who soft bounced with a DNS Error, but who also were delivered and email AFTER that bounce. I only had 4 results, so I'm unclear on what's exactly at work here.