Marketing Cloud Engagement | Salesforce Trailblazer Community

Intermittent Gmail Delivery Failures in SFMC Since 15 August 2026 – PTR, SPF and DMARC Issues Across Multiple Sending Domains

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

1 answer

Lukas Lunow (NoA Ignite) Forum Ambassador
Yesterday, 11:07 AM
I will check with @Salesforce Deliverability group, and see if someone there - possibly @Michael Wright
could have some suggestions for dealing with this issue.

However I am surprised that support assured you that everything was fine - since you have clear evidence from your own monitoring and bounce data view, that Gmail reports issues on the sending end. I will try and push the support to open a so-called GUS Investigation for these deliverability issues - if not done already. These investigations are managed by Salesforce deliverability team, and are often more helpful than the work done by their regular support.

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Aug 26, 6:03 PM

How would you build an ROI Calculator for Journeys ?

The idea would be to allow users to enter data such as Journey investment/cost, number of customers impacted, conversion rate, average order value, and revenue generated, and have the system automatically calculate the ROI. In addition to revenue generated, I’d also like to consider cost avoidance for Journeys that don’t necessarily generate revenue but help reduce or avoid costs. What other inputs, metrics, and formulas would you consider important to make this calculation more reliable, especially when it comes to incremental revenue, cost avoidance, and control groups ?

#Marketing Cloud #Marketing Cloud Engagement #Tactics Driving Marketing ROI #Journey Builder

3 answers

Lukas Lunow (NoA Ignite) Forum Ambassador
Aug 27, 8:31 PM
Good question, and one I'd like to answer properly, but the honest answer is that the shape of what you build changes completely depending on a few things you haven't told us yet. So let me ask rather than guess.

First, a snag in the input list. You've got conversion rate, AOV and revenue generated as separate inputs. Those can't all be independent, either revenue is derived (contacts × CR × AOV) or it's measured from actual order data. If both, the calculator can disagree with itself on day one. Which is it meant to be?

Is this a forecast or a scorecard? A pre-launch business case with sliders and ranges, and a post-launch "what did this actually earn us" report, are two different artefacts. Same formulas, completely different data sources and completely different build. Most of these tools get abandoned because they try to be both.

Are your journeys always-on or campaign-shaped? For an always-on journey, ROI isn't a number, it's a curve. Contacts keep entering, conversion rate drifts, build cost is sunk and shrinking per contact over time. You'd need entry cohorts and a payback view, not a single figure.

Do you already have holdouts running? This is the big one. Without a control group you're not measuring incremental anything, and no amount of formula design fixes that. If you do have them: are they persisted per contact, or re-rolled with Random Split on each entry? And is there a global holdout as well as per-journey ones? (Per-journey lifts don't sum to portfolio lift, and the gap matters.)

Where do revenue and cost data actually live? MCE has neither revenue nor margin nor cost of goods. That pushes the actuals half of this toward Data 360 / your warehouse / Tableau, with MCE contributing engagement and holdout membership. Is that available to you, or are you constrained to build inside MCE?

Who owns the cost-avoidance assumptions? Cost avoidance is where business cases go to get manufactured. If Finance hasn't signed off on "cost per deflected call," it's a soft number and should be flagged as one.

One last thing, said kindly: most of this question isn't really MCE-specific. Incrementality design, control-group methodology, margin vs revenue, cost-avoidance taxonomy: that's marketing measurement, and it would be true if you were running Braze or a spreadsheet. The genuinely MCE-shaped slice is narrow: how to persist a holdout flag so it survives re-entry, how to get engagement data out into something that can join it to orders, and whether a Cloud Page + assumptions DE is a sane place to put the front end. Happy to go deep on that slice here, since that's what this group is good at.

For the measurement-design half you'll get better answers where the analytics and architecture folks hang out. The Marketing Architects group, or a Data 360 / Tableau group. Genuinely worth cross-posting; it's a good question, just a two-venue one.

Tell me which of these apply and I'll happily go into the formulas with you.

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Sep 22, 6:19 PM

*** Important Security Update: Enforcement of IP Allowlisting in Marketing Cloud Engagement on September 23, 2026 ***As part of our commitment to strengthening the default security of the Marketing Cloud Engagement platform, Salesforce is requiring the use of the login IP allowlist in blocking mode for all accounts. We have identified that your instance doesn't use the login IP allowlist in blocking mode. On September 23, 2026, we will enable it on your behalf.

Next Steps & Timeline

To help minimize potential disruption, we reviewed your recent login activity and compiled a list of recommended baseline IP addresses to include on your login IP allowlist. On September 23, 2026, we will enable blocking mode for your instance. After this date, users can log in to your Marketing Cloud Engagement account from an IP address on the allowlist.

Configuration Impact and Customer Responsibility

No action is required before September 23, 2026. To ensure your configuration is applied correctly, we recommend waiting until after September 23, 2026, before making any changes to your login IP allowlist settings. If you have any concerns, contact Salesforce Support.

After September 23, 2026, you are responsible for reviewing and maintaining your login IP allowlist. Monitor your login IP allowlist access logs on an ongoing basis to identify new IP ranges to add. See View the Access Log, Add IP Addresses to the Allowlist, and Edit an IP Range.

When we enable blocking mode in your account, you can expect these changes:

We will apply a Salesforce-recommended baseline IP list consisting of standard /24 (256 address) IP ranges. These ranges are based on IPs observed to successfully authenticate to your instance over the last six months, excluding known malicious IPs.
"Log Violations and Deny Access" (blocking) mode will be enabled at the EID level for both UI Login and API access, with the IP ranges uniformly applied to all Business Units (BUs).

Resources

#Marketing Cloud Engagement #Marketing Cloud

13 comments

Arijit Banerjee (Salesforce)
Oct 1, 1:46 PM
IP Allowlisting would continue in cohort wise manner, with final enforcement in January. Customers will be notified via email when an enforcement date has been set for their instance to enable blocking mode.

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Sep 29, 4:33 AM

SFMC - Identifying API External Apps and Integrations

Hello all, newbie here. I'm refreshing the secret key for our installed Package, Email Concierge API, in Salesforce Marketing Cloud. A consultant initially set up this package, and I was wondering how I can find all the External Apps and Integration using the current secret key, so they can be updated with the newly generated key. What's the easiest way to do this?

#Salesforce Admin #Marketing Cloud Engagement #Marketing Cloud #API

4 answers

Cliff Warner
Sep 30, 4:31 PM
Wow, I'm overwhelmed with all the great answers. Thank You All!!!!

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Sep 8, 4:36 PM

Salesforce Marketing Cloud Data Streams Are Not Created After Deployment

Hi everyone! 👋

I’d really appreciate your opinion on a Data Cloud deployment issue I’m currently facing.

I’ve completed the entire Data Cloud implementation in my Dev instance, and I’m now trying to move everything to a Test instance.

I’ve included all the Data Streams, Identity Resolution, and Data Graphs in a single DevOps Data Kit.

The Data Streams are split into two categories based on the connector:

Salesforce CRM connector → Data Streams for SFSC
Salesforce Marketing Cloud connector → Data Streams for Marketing Cloud Engagement

I’ve been trying to deploy the entire Data Kit through CLI / Change Set, but I’m running into several issues:

The Marketing Cloud Engagement Data Streams were not created.
As a result, Identity Resolution and Data Graphs were also not created.
The SFSC Data Streams were created, but incompletely, with missing fields, relationships, and mappings.
I also tried deploying a single Data Stream, as well as deploying the SFSC and SFMC Data Streams separately, but I still get a generic error asking me to contact Salesforce Support.

I’ve already spent quite a bit of time troubleshooting this with Salesforce Support, but we haven’t found a resolution yet.

From what I’m observing, the Data Kit itself may not be working correctly for this type of deployment.

I was curious to know if anyone here has experienced something similar, especially with Marketing Cloud Engagement Data Streams, and how you managed to resolve it.

Has anyone successfully deployed Data Cloud Data Streams from a Dev environment to a Test environment using a Data Kit?

If so, I’d really appreciate any advice on the correct approach or any known limitations I should be aware of.

Thanks in advance! 🙏

#Data Cloud #Marketing Cloud Engagement

3 answers

Vishal Verma (Fluido)
Sep 8, 8:50 PM
Hi @Ionuț Buzatu
- It seems like a Data Kit/deployment limitation or Salesforce issue

Check the deployment logs for the detailed error.
Verify SFMC connector authorization in the target org.
If individual SFMC streams still fail, raise it with Salesforce Support as a Data Cloud Data Kit deployment issue.

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Sep 2, 6:59 AM

Is it possible for us to dynamically extract every data extension that is in a folder?

Dear Community,

I have one technical question: One of my Marketing cloud client want to dynamically extract DE in a Particular folder to SFTP as a csv or json file. Folder path:

Data Extensions >Interactive Content.

I have tried Pivoting the DE using SQL activity but for Future DEs I need to keep adding the SQl Activity. So client wants to Dynamically extracts DEs from the Folder to SFTP.

Do you have any suggestions to achieve this or any use case from past experience will help me a lot.

Thank you,

Guru

#Trailhead Challenges #Trailhead #SFMC #Marketing Cloud #Marketing Cloud Engagement #AgentforceMarketing

6 answers

Himanshu Shekhar (AQBEE Innovations Pvt. Ltd.)
Sep 3, 10:05 AM
Good question, Guru. The reason columns are missing: your script retrieves the DataExtension object, which only carries Name and CustomerKey. The COLUMNS live on a separate object, DataExtensionField, so you fetch them per DE.

Easiest is SSJS Core (faster than WSProxy). For each customerKey you already have:

var de = DataExtension.Init(customerKey);
var fields = de.Fields.Retrieve();
var columns = [];
for (var i = 0; i < fields.length; i++) {
columns.push(fields[i].Name);
}

Each field also carries FieldType, IsPrimaryKey, MaxLength, Ordinal, DefaultValue and StorageType, so you can capture data types and the primary key too if you want.

So loop your existing DE list, call Fields.Retrieve per customerKey, and add that columns array into your JSON next to the Name and CustomerKey you already have.

if this helps, please mark it as the Best Answer so it helps the next person, thanks 🙂

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Aug 23, 2:03 PM

How Long To Move To Engagement+? To Get New SKUs

Hi there, we have been using Marketing Cloud Engagement for a while. We are keen to move to Marketing Cloud Engagement+ so we can start using Marketing Cloud Next functionality. Our SF Sales reps have suggested for a while that we should use Engagement+, and have said that we will need the new SKUs added to our contract, however, it is taking a very long time to identify the SKUs to add to the contract.

Has anyone gained access to Engagement+ yet? How long did it take? Do you know which SKUs were involved for Engagement+? Is there n extra charge for gaining access to Engagement+, or is it really just and upgrade?

FYI We have been using Data Cloud for 18+ months, so we are confident with DC360.

#Marketing Cloud #Marketing Cloud Engagement

1 answer

Lukas Lunow (NoA Ignite) Forum Ambassador
Aug 24, 12:25 PM
Your Salesforce AE should be on top of which SKUs are to be included here, as this can change quite frequently. The bottom line is, the MCE+ SKU is free of charge, but only includes very basic consumption. Once you start ingesting data to Data 360, running identity resolutions and unifications, as well as segmentations, the cost can quickly go up. So it is important to move slowly, and keep an eye on your Digital Wallet in Data 360, which gives you an insight about how many credits you are spending.

It is always a good idea to purchase these flex credits beforehand, as you will otherwise be paying a premium price due to overage.

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Aug 20, 12:40 AM

Mc API

Hello Cmmunity:

I wanted to ask a question: I’m considering changing my model for notifying customers about order status updates. For this, the recommendation is to use an installed package to provide credentials—in this case, to the logistics provider—so they can make API calls to my Marketing Cloud instance, correct?

Thanks

#Marketing Cloud #Marketing Cloud Engagement

8 answers

Lukas Lunow (NoA Ignite) Forum Ambassador
Aug 20, 7:08 PM
Middleware is the right solution, if the system used by logistics-provider can't accomodate the specifications of the REST endpoint required to trigger the email. Then the middleware can accept an arbitrary payload (or even better - integrate with a microservice architecture, where it subscribes to event notifications), and send a payload which matches the specs of the relevant MCE endpoint.

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Apr 23, 8:18 PM

I'm looking to put my Salesforce Marketing Cloud skills to good use. Volunteering my time for organizations that need help with building journeys, cleaning up data, figuring out best practices, or anything else SFMC-related. If you know of any groups that could use support, I'd love to connect.

#Volunteer Opportunities #Marketing Cloud #Marketing Cloud Engagement #Marketing Cloud for Nonprofits #SFMC