Send in Recipient Time Zone - Out of Office replies

[Anonymous]

Sent a campaign yesterday to a global list of 5,000, but I have yet to receive a single OOO. I know I have a great deliverability rating and optimize my send times, but I've never sent a campaign and not receive a single OOO response. Does Marketo hold response to the reply-to address until the campaign has completed when using Send in Recipient Time Zone?

[Loren_Posendek]

Hi Ramon! We've used the Recipient Time Zone feature in a few of our single email sends and received OOO replies throughout the day - as emails were delivered in each recipients time zone. I'd just double-check that email was sent (using a smart list filter of "was sent email" and/or "was delivered email"), then reach out to Marketo Support. It does seem odd that there were no OOO replies received.  Hope that helps!

[Anonymous]

Thanks Loren Posendek

I created the smartist and there's only a difference of 5 emails sent vs delivered. I've reached out to support, and I'll post should I learn anything new in their response.

[SanfordWhiteman]

Marketo doesn't receive the Reply-Tos so it can't "hold" them anyway.

[Anonymous]

Any helpful suggestions to why no OOO might have been received? or am I just fortunate enough to have reached everyone in the office?

[SanfordWhiteman]

Did your own mailserver (which receives replies) have an outage? Was there a typo in the Reply-To: or From: header?

[JD_Nelson]

typo's in the 'reply-to' or 'from' are the WORST!

[Anonymous]

check with my internal team re: mailserver, no downtime and checked reply-to... but here's something i hadn't thought of... 'reply-to' and 'from' are different. saw a little activity to the from address

[Loren_Posendek]

Ahhh yes! If the 'reply-to' and 'from' addresses are different, often times the OOO messages will go to the 'from' address. As I understand it, the 'reply-to' is when someone clicks 'reply' and responds that way - much like we're doing on this thread with the 'reply.'

[SanfordWhiteman · Accepted solution]

often times the OOO messages will go to the 'from' address. As I understand it, the 'reply-to' is when someone clicks 'reply' and responds that way - much like we're doing on this thread with the 'reply.'

That's right, the Reply-To: is intended to be for human-triggered (non-automatic) responses.

Note the From: is also supposed to be for human responses/replies only.  There's an entire RFC that covers automatic responses and it recommends unequivocally that the Return-Path (i.e. SMTP envelope sender, like unique-verp-id@something.mktomail.com) be used for auto-responses, not the From: (nor Sender:, nor Reply-To:) address.

However, this is an example of where the best-laid plans of an international standards body cannot compete with the decisions made by software vendors! In practice, mailservers send to the From: anyway.