Mailings still going to deleted leads?

[Anonymous]

I know this seems like a dumb question but I've seen evidence of it over and over again.

My mailings seem to go to "bad" leads even after they've been deleted.  I will get a bounceback from an email address, go into All Leads and search for it and find that it does not exist. 

I've submitted multiple examples to support and their answer was that I can't prove the emails were sent from Marketo, which sounds ridiculous.

Has anyone else experienced this?  Any thoughts or suggestions?

[Rachel_Noble]

It's possible that you're sending to a different email address that's forwarded to the deleted one (e.g. johndoe@acme.com is deleted, you email janesmith@acme.com who left the company, and Jane's email address is forwarded to John). This happens all the time and causes a bit of confusion. If you have a large database, it's even more likely.

[Anonymous]

That does make sense.  I'm working on a bit of database cleanup so hopefully that will help!

[SanfordWhiteman]

I've submitted multiple examples to support and their answer was that I can't prove the emails were sent from Marketo, which sounds ridiculous.

Rachel's response is spot-on. This response from Support is sort of okay because if you can't show them the Message-ID of the original message (or SMTP-level logs) it's true that they can't see it as a Marketo email. Of course they should've had Rachel's answer at the ready...

[Anonymous]

Yes, that does make sense.  Thanks!

[Anonymous]

I also agree with Rachel's answer as we have had this occur ourselves on emails. It is frustrating when you get an autoresponse from an email address that does not exist in your database but does not provide the details of who in the company has really left and hence we cannot mark to remove the right person from future sends straight away.

[Kevin_McMahon1]

We are having a similar issue.

We often get very angry email replies from people who say they have unsubscribed 10 times and demand we stop sending them emails. Every single time I find the address successfully unsubscribed the first time, but they have a second email address in our database and must have automatic email forwarding in place. So then I manually unsubscribe the other one and kindly reply back saying they will no longer have this issue.

It seems like this wouldn't happen often as most people should know whether or not they have automatic forwarding rules, but I usually see about 5/month with this issue. It's really more of their problem becoming my problem, so does anyone have any advice for this?

[SanfordWhiteman]

Only advice -- which is quite a leap but does give you much better visibility if you're willing -- is to embed the lead ID in the From: and Reply-To: email addresses. (This is a form of VERP addressing, which Marketo and all ESPs use at the SMTP level to track bounces.)

The prerequisite is that you use a mail service (like GSuite) that can use "plus addressing."

You set the header sender(s) to <kevin.mcmahon+{{Lead.Id}}@example.com>. Then replies will go to, for example <kevin.mcmahon+123456@example.com> and you'll always be able to find the original lead record.

[Anonymous]

Kevin, we’ve had that exact issue as well. I’m not surprised that the two are related.

[Steven_Vanderb3]

I regularly receive marketing emails where in the unsubscribe footer they'll have included something like, "This email was sent to xxx@gmail.com.  If you would like to unsubscribe or update your preferences, click here".  That adds some identifying information for both you and the recipient; at that point they'd be able to tell where it's being forwarded from without contacting you.