Urgent: Discrepancy in Email Performance report and People performance report and campaign run count

[Nitish]

Hi all,
I sent an Email campaign with smart list (person type, marketable email, people not in competitor SL, Region) and flow is simple send Email
but the run count comes out to be 4751 and Email Performance reports is showing the count 4746 and People performance reports comes out to be 4606 .. count isn't coming out to be exact at first so When I drilled down the people performance report using email address I found 18 Emails are sent to Dummy email (Dummy@dummy.com) .. and When i checked this emails in Marketo Database there were around 67 leads with same email ... 
So my question is how Marketo is sending 18 Email to Dummy email (Dummy@dummy.com) and how will marketo treat this in reports  

[SanfordWhiteman · Accepted solution]

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So my question is how Marketo is sending 18 Email to Dummy email (Dummy@dummy.com) and how will marketo treat this in reports  

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There’s nothing special about that domain. In fact it has an A record, so it can receive mail.

You may think of dummy.com as a meaningless placeholder domain, but it most certainly isn’t. It’s owned by a private company and you could even try to buy it from them!

The placeholder-ish domains not owned by private entities are example.net, example.org, and example.com as well as .example and the other standardized TLDs for examples and tests. But the first 3 aren’t guaranteed to not have MX records. And even the others aren’t treated in a special way until you try to resolve them (they can never have MX or A records, though).