Issues with Email Soft Bounces that are classified as Hard Bounces

[maximilianhaensler]

Dear Experts,

since 2-3 months I'm facing several issues with email hard bounces that are classified wrong. We checked the hard bounced email adresses with our sales represantatives as they get an automatic task in C4C to check hard bounced email adresses. Resulting in: the email domains that bounced hard are actually all valid and can be used for email communication. At best they should bounce soft.

Locating the EMAIL_BOUNCE_HARD interactions in the system the detailed error message is:

'BOUNCED-FINISHED-HARD_BOUNCE:delivery attempt failed bounced (host mail. ... ...) said: 550 delivery denied: no valid recipient or authentication missing (in reply to RCPT TO command)'

Unfortunately we lose the contacts' email adresses after the interaction EMAIL_HARD_BOUNCE; in addition it's associated with manual effort to get those email adresses back in the system because they'll bounce hard probably next time again.

I already raised several tickets and Incidents for sinch (former SAP Digital Interconnect) and for SAP as we're using it as email service provider without notable success.

I'm wondering if any of you have had the same or similar experience with sinch / SAP DI or maybe you have an advice how to deal with it.

Thank you in advance.

Best regards,

Maximilian Hänsler

[isathore]

Hello All,

I would like to share the blog post SAP Marketing Cloud Bounces Management using Sinch E-mail 365 | SAP Blogs. I hope it can help understanding how bounces are managed and some facts behind them.

Best Regards

Isabelle

[SCHNEIDERT]

Hey you two,

nice to know that you feel the same way.

I opened an incident in May(!) and written back and forth over 40 times with SAP/Sinch support team. Of course without any success. I'm now trying to contact our SAP Account Executive and forward that case to him.

In addition to the case explained by Maximilian, we're receiving lots of Bounce Mails not within SAP Marketing Cloud but within the mailbox of our Marketing Team (the reply-to-address we provisioned in the Provisioning Form). It's incredibly annoying and a really bad service.

As Maximilian said...... a problem shared is a problem halved ...

Thank you guys for your input. Good to know I'm not alone...

BR Tobias

[maximilianhaensler]

Hey Tobias,

thank you for your understanding words. Sad to hear that you also made negative experience regarding SAP/sinch support on ESP issues.
I'll go with the same approach: Now that almost two month passed by without a suitable solution I'll reach out to our internal SAP Launchpad and Escalation Manager to put more pressure on the incident. As a customer It's unacceptable you are so powerless in the face of ESP and that no attempt is made to find solutions.

Thanks for your input as well.

Best regards,

Max

[maximilianhaensler]

Hi Maik,

glad to hear that we're not the only one struggling with this issue - but feeling annoyed and sorry for you too at the same time. Luckily our sales represantatives know their customers very well so they can react on contacting them which is very time-consuming and expensive.

I do see the logical purpose in reacting with hard bounces after getting the error code 5XX but I don't understand why the error code is created in the first place.

I'm playing ping pong with sinch / SAP DI and SAP support since 2,5 months now without coming a single step further. May I ask from where do you get the daily report about bounce domains? Is it from sinch / SAP DI?

... a problem shared is a problem halved ...

[maik_bosch]

Same ticket ping pong on our side 🙂 As I understood SINCH the email service providers are creating those 5XX errors. But maybe it's just blaming the other side 😉

The email report is purely custom. Based on Custom CDS (Primary Data Source:
I_MKT_CampaignSuccessCube) we created an OData API and use this in Cloud Integration to create an email every morning.

[maximilianhaensler]

Thank you for your comment. I think I'll go on with the communication with sinch and see where we go.
In case I'm struggling with the custom CDS report I would get in touch with you.

[maik_bosch]

Welcome to the club 🙂 Same issues on our side 😄 and same "success" with SAP support. Luckily you can revalidate the email addresses. Right now we are receiving an email report every morning with the highest numbers of bounces for specific domains. based on this if we see any peaks we react then. As for us it was really domain specific and quite often only temporary issue. But from SINCH no positive answer, too. As they say if we receive those error codes 5XX from the email service provider interface we react with hard bounces. Which I can understand, too