Many of our emails are bouncing due to blacklisting of Marketo's email address

[Dan_Stevens_]

We employ many email best practices to ensure our deliverability is as effective as possible.  In fact, we just recently deployed Informatica’s email validation/verification service.  Just before an email went out this morning we validated every email address against this service.  We then pruned all emails with a bad/suspect status code. Yet, when we sent the email, almost 10% bounced (over 650).  After looking at a random sample of bounce reasons in the activity log, it appears our email address – or more specifically, Marketo’s mktomail.com domain – is being blacklisted with several of our contacts:

• 553-Sorry, your email address 857-NHG-455.0.48440.0.0.17771. 553-9.489756@em-sj-77.mktomail.com has been blacklisted. 553-Refer to the Troubleshooting page at 553-http://www.symanteccloud.com/troubleshooting for more 553 information. (#5.7.1)

We're even on the preferred range of IP addresses.  I've opened a ticket with Support, hoping that they'll route this to the deliverability team.  Have any of you experienced a large volume of these, and if so, did that team help un-blacklist you?

[Anonymous]

Hey Franklin - We had a similar issue when we first transitioned over to Marketo last year. We partnered with the Marketo Deliverability team and they were able to resolve all of our challenges. Tifaine Highly on the deliverability team is amazing. We now have quarterly check-ins just to confirm that there's nothing fishy going on.

[Anonymous]

We have been seeing great deliverability to our customers until this weekend. We have two dedicated IP addresses and for some reason this happened to us. We have been seeing 97%+ delivered to yesterday's 65%. It's ridiculous. Have you made any progress?

[Steven_Vanderb3]

Hey Franklin, we'll take a look so go ahead and submit a ticket.

[Anonymous]

Hi Dan

I too have just experienced the same issues, and getting the same notification message as you. I will raise a ticket. Does anyone know if we can identify when and why the email address was blacklisted - is there a log?

thanks

Gary

[Sarah_Hare]

Sounds like the same thing I have experienced also with the same error message from Symantec. Asking our top clients to whitelist Marketo ips is not a real solution.

Rodolfo Yiu​  we are in the same boat - frustrating!

[Grégoire_Miche2]

Subscribing to a service such as MXToolbox blacklist alerts might be useful

-Greg

[Josh_Hill13]

250ok seems to have a nice automation for this tracking.

[Dan_Stevens_]

It looks like Marketo is a customer of 250ok. I wonder if this is a white labeled solution that Marketo packages with their deliverability offering.

Customer Success | 250ok

[Josh_Hill13]

it is.

[SanfordWhiteman]

It is.

[Anonymous]

I have the exact Symantec error message from 2 out of my top 5 client email domains. Support was not able to help me and asked me to ask my clients (which are publicly listed companies) to whitelist Marketo. Support also shared that moving to Trusted IP or Dedicated IP will not help the issue.

Pretty frustrated that we cannot send marketing emails to my 2 clients.

[Dan_Stevens_]

That's a pretty unrealistic request - especially for large public companies.  If anything, ask them to "whitelist DKIM-signed messages from a specific domain" - per Sanford Whiteman​'s comment here: Re: Instructions for customers on how to whitelist Marketo

Here's another thread regarding some of our email issues with our top clients: Re: Marketo emails showing up as BULK - with no ability to show images

[Josh_Hill13]

If you fill out the form or work with the Privacy team on automating your processes, it can help.

But this may  not have been caused by you...if you are using a shared IP. Some things to note:

• purchased lists will have a higher bounce rate
• older leads will bounce higher if you haven't been working them.
• Informatica isn't perfect and it's possible to bounce. How strict were you with their codes?
• are you  invalidating bounced leads earlier?

[Dan_Stevens_]

I just learned from Support that we're on the Shared IP range.  We were placed on the Trusted range back in August 2015 - no one ever told us that we moved back to the shared range (which is also concerning since we have specific clients where we have given them the trusted IP range of addresses to ensure our emails get delivered to them).  I'm further investigating this.

We've suppressed the following Informatica status codes:

• 250 (Email Valid, Potentially Dangerous)
• 260 (Domain Confirmed, Potentially Dangerous)
• 270 (Analytics in Progress, Potentially Dangerous)
• 300 (Email Not Valid)
• 310 (Not Verified)
• 400 (Invalid Input)
• 500 (Internal Error)

As for invalidating earlier bounced leads, yes, in fact we're using the approach that's well-documented in your Rockstar Guide!

[Josh_Hill13]

There are a few other codes that you may want to remove. We only sent when we had 200, 210. But if you are sending internationally, you have to be less restrictive.

Marketo does tend to shift people around on a Shared spectrum: bad people, ok people, trusted

and you have to ask.

[Grégoire_Miche2]

Hi Dan,

You may want to involve Kiersti Esparza in this thread She is Marketo's Director, Email Privacy and Deliverability

-Greg

[Dan_Stevens_]

Thanks Greg.  Kiersti Esparza, any thoughts?