Gmail Outage Causes Erroneous Hard Bounces

You may have heard by now that Google services have experienced major outages on Dec 14 and 15.

Not only Gmail users had difficulties logging into their accounts, but emails sent to Gmail accounts have been rejected by google with:

“code”: “550”,

“extCode”: “5.1.1”,

“message”: “The email account that you tried to reach does not exist. Please try double-checking the recipient’s email address for typos or unnecessary spaces. Learn more at https://support.google.com/mail/?p=NoSuchUser”

 

This means that if you had been sending emails to Gmail addresses during the outage you likely had a high bounce rate for your Gmail addresses and possibly your campaigns and accounts overall. Since BigMailer pauses campaigns with high bounce rate you may have received notifications about your campaigns being paused due to high bounce rate.

You should review engagement by domain report on any campaigns you sent on Monday-Tuesday.

You might see a high hard bounce rate for Gmail.com domain:

If your Amazon SES account got suspended you should reply to the email you received from Amazon and explain that most of the bounces were erroneous from Gmail due to outage (if this is in fact the case). A screenshot of the report, like the example above, and a link to this post may help with a faster resolution and account re-instatement.

While the original issue is outside of our control and influence we are monitoring situation and exploring ways we can rectify it by possibly reseting the bounce status on the affected addresses.

We will post an update once we take any action on this situation. If you need a faster advisory on rectifying this yourself please reach out to us via live chat once you log into your BigMailer account.

UPDATE Dec 17: BigMailer had addressed this issue by reseting the hard bounce status for affected contacts.

UPDATE Jan 6: Most marketers are not even aware of the issue as per the poll we ran on Twitter.