Hi Trailblazer Community,
We have been experiencing intermittent email delivery failures to Gmail recipients from Salesforce Marketing Cloud (SFMC) since 15 August 2026. The issue affects multiple sending domains and appears sporadically.
Issue description
We are observing the following symptoms:
- Emails sent to Gmail recipients are intermittently rejected.
- SPF and DMARC authentication results sometimes show as Fail, while other messages show Pass.
- Some failures are recorded as Unknown Bounces in SFMC.
- When we investigate the bounce details using the SFMC _Bounce Data View and review our deliverability monitoring reports, we see Gmail SMTP error 550-5.7.25, indicating that the sending IP may be missing a valid PTR (reverse DNS) record or that the corresponding forward DNS entry does not resolve back to the sending IP.
- The issue is occurring across multiple sending domains rather than being isolated to one domain.
Investigation completed so far
- Our domain team has confirmed that no DNS record changes were made during the period under investigation.
- The Salesforce team has also indicated that they have not made any DNS record changes.
- We have reviewed SPF, DKIM and DMARC configurations, which appear correctly configured, although intermittent authentication failures are still reported.
- The bounce details and deliverability monitoring reports indicate PTR-related failures for the sending IP.
We are trying to establish whether this is related to the sending IP infrastructure, reverse DNS configuration, DNS resolution inconsistencies, or another underlying issue.
Questions for the community
- Has anyone experienced similar intermittent Gmail delivery failures in SFMC since 15 August 2026?
- Can a PTR or forward-confirmed reverse DNS issue occur intermittently even when the DNS configuration appears correct?
- If multiple sending domains are affected, could the underlying issue be related to a shared Salesforce sending IP pool or Salesforce-managed infrastructure?
- What is the recommended approach to correlate SFMC _Bounce Data View records with the actual Gmail SMTP rejection responses and the sending IP used for each message?
- Has Salesforce Support identified any known issues or infrastructure changes that could cause this behavior?
We would appreciate insights from anyone who has resolved a similar issue, particularly where SPF, DKIM and DMARC configurations appeared correct but Gmail continued to report PTR-related delivery failures.
Thank you in advance for your help.
#Marketing Cloud #Marketing Cloud Engagement #Email Deliverbility #MC Domain Verification
Not sure if helpful as our issue was with Microsoft, but we had a similar situation earlier this year. Everything our end was the same as it's always been but suddenly we had a lot of hard bounces to Microsoft email addresses only.
The cause was an IP restriction on their end due to another sender in our shared IP pool. I was able to get this restriction removed with the help of Salesforce and Microsoft support teams.