Soft Bounce Error Messages: Yahoo, AOL, and Verizon

Question

Question on Soft BouncesContext/background: Recently warmed dedicated IP. This process went very well. After warming we sent a promotional email and the deliverability is terrible (around 60%). Note: about 8 days between last warming email send and first promo email.Problem: Majority of bounces are soft and have returned error messages for Yahoo, AOL and Verizon. The error message returned are all:554 5.4.5 [internal] (last transfail: 421 4.7.0 [TSS04] Messages from 192.28.155.34 temporarily deferred due to user complaints - 4.16.55.1; see https://help.yahoo.com/kb/postmaster/SLN3434.html)Other information: IP Sender Score/Reputation all looks great. IP is not listed on any blacklists (According to ReturnPath. MXtoolbox and Talos)Question: How do you mitigate this type of soft bounce error? It seems to be the one issue we're facing.

Ande_Kempf4 · Accepted Answer

Question ResolvedAfter discussing this issue with @Courtney Grimes she explained that this is a pretty standard case of greylisting for Oath (AOL/Yahoo/Verizon). What happens is a person will hit the "HEY THIS IS SPAM " button, which then sends a feedback loop to Marketo to unsubscribe the person.If enough people do that (and mind you, the threshold is comically low) then it'll trigger a response on Oath's side to say this sender is getting too many complaints.To determine what audience is doing this you'll need to build a smart list of folks who unsubscribed without filling out an unsubscribe form. Use Data Value Changed and Reason = Customer complaint received from ISP". The list narrows down the audience causing the user complaint issue.Hope this helps anyone else who runs into a similar problem!

Jay_Jiang · Answer

If you don't have an organically gathered database, or if you're sending emails to data 2+ years old, you may have hit a spamtrap/honeypot operated by the email networks you are currently blocked by

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