Why is a fake domain identifier being soft bounced instead of hard bounced?

[Anonymous]

  Could someone tell me why the bogus email address jkhjkhjkhk@nnnmkm.com is being soft bounced instead of hard bounced? The domain with the nnnmkm identifier does not exist, so this message should have been hard bounced.

Thanks, Michelle

[Matt_Stone2]

Have you looked at the soft bounce reason? That might shed some light.

[Anonymous]

 

Message is: 554 5.4.5 [internal] Delivery not attempted (message expired)

Not sure why that’s considered a soft bounce. If this means that Marketo knows this is a fake address, why would it label it as a soft bounce instead of a hard bounce? And it seems like Marketo ought to mark these as Undeliverable if it knows the address doesn’t exist.

[Matt_Stone2]

That's a good question. It might be Marketo trying to prevent sending to bad emails, but they also don't want to outright unsubscribe/suspend leads when they technically haven't hit the criteria for doing so.

Hopefully a Marketo rep will see this thread, but otherwise you might want to shoot support a message.