Unable to send a sample email

[Christine_Rios]

I have been trying to send an approved email draft to my personal email for review for the past few days, and have yet to have a successful attempt. Can someone please look into this?

[Anonymous]

Have you tried sending the test email from a smart campaign?
Smart List --> Email is {your email address}

Flow --> Send email

Schedule -> Edit -> Qualify person more than once (if you would like to send the email multiple times to yourself)

We use this method when sending test emails, rather than Send Sample.

I hope this will help.

[Patrick_Vesely]

Check your communication limits.  You can change your daily count to unlimited, send a test and then change it back

[Chloe_Pott]

Sending sample emails don't count in the communication limits. But if she wants to send a true email as a test then yes, it counts towards the comm limits.

[Patrick_Vesely]

yes, it is not suppoesed to but this has happened to us.  As soon as I updated the communication limits, the sample went thru.

[Alexandra_Ash]

Hi! I've generally found the reason I wasn't getting a test email was an error within a token somewhere. Unfortunately Marketo won't tell you what or where the error lies, but yes - check out your tokens/token formatting in the to/from section!

[Liliana_Cheng1]

Came here to say the same thing - last time this happened to me, it was an error with the token in the email, but Marketo didn't indicate which token/where it was.

[Tara_Montanez]

I had this same issue this week where a from address was a token. Once I changed the from email address to a general email working address, the sample went through.  Perhaps that is your issue as well?

[Daniel_Petrucci]

Tara brings up a good point - which we've experienced ourselves.

There's a chance there're character codes hidden at the design view for w/e tokens you're using. Unfortunately, MKTO doesn't seem to throw an error when tokens are unable to parse and as a result, no error notification & no email is sent.

I suggest using the token function in either the WYSIWYG or From, Reply-to, or subject lines if you haven't already. Also remember to address any tokens in the txt version - un-parsable tokens in txt will cause the same issue.

[Stephanie_Chho1]

Hi Christine, just wondering whether you have setup DKIM and SPF, and using the from address to send your email with the same domain of your DKIM and SPF?

We found the same issue where we never received sample emails. The email's from address was using a different domain from the SPF setup.

This is because most of the public web email clients like gmail started to reject email sent without SPF. If you have not setup your SPF or you are using a different domain for from address from your SPF, your sample email is most likely get rejected, thus, bounced.

Hope this helps.

[SanfordWhiteman]

Let's not get ahead of ourselves -- SPF is only relevant if you have the branded sender domain add-on to a Marketo subscription (which is included if you have a dedicated instance, but not if you have a basic shared instance).

SPF checks the RFC 821 envelope sender domain, not the RFC 822 From: domain in the email headers.

You can read more here: https://blog.teknkl.com/your-marketo-spf-entry-doesnt-matter-unless-youre-paying-extra/

[Stephanie_Chho1]

Unfortunately, we tested using smart campaign flow step send email and received a bounce back from gmail with bounced reason Control unauthenticated mail from your domain - Gmail Help.

We tried it for yahoo, aol and hotmail - same result and same reason.

We then use the from address with the domain of the SPF and all of those personal emails received it.

From the look of it, they require SPF to be setup.

[SanfordWhiteman]

No, SPF only pertains to the envelope sender domain.

The From: domain is not being verified using SPF. There's no wiggle room on this -- it's simply not happening. DKIM can assist in verifying/non-repudiating From: (and other) headers.

You can learn more about how SPF does and doesn't work in these posts: https://blog.teknkl.com/tag/spf

[Anonymous]

Hi Christine. The first thing that comes to my mind since your team is using it for the first time is: Have you selected a Person from your database in the Sample selection when you add the details in the Send Sample Email popup? Meaning that in the field Person, you should have someone who's an existing contact in your database. Then in Send to you add your personal email. The system won't just recognize a random personal email to send the sample.

Hope this helps.

[Jay_Jiang]

Try actually sending the email to yourself and seeing the result in the smart campaign if it says email delivered or if there's a bounced reason. You'll need to add yourself to the database

[Matjaž_Jaušove2]

Does Marketo report an error or you just don't receive the test email? Have you tried to sent it to another email address?

[Christine_Rios]

I just don't receive the email. I have tried multiple email address with no luck

[Matjaž_Jaušove2]

Are those addresses on different domains or on the same (your corporate) domain?

[Christine_Rios]

I've tried using different domains as well as the same (corporate) domain - no luck.

[Matjaž_Jaušove2]

But is this a general Marketo issue or just specific to a single email in a program/campaign?

[Christine_Rios]

Unclear at this point. This is my team's first time using the platform, and we plan on distributing emails on Friday but would like to conduct testing prior to that.