I’ve not seen this behavior change. In fact, it was among the #1 concerns of my executives, who quite enjoyed having Gainsight CS JO handle digital comms, but didn’t enjoy nearly as much the bounce / OOO responses. It’s especially problematic because the “Reply To” address only governs actual recipient-driven replies, not the automatic replies concerning deliverability.

The only way I’ve seen around this is to deliberately miskey the “Send From” email address, but also deliberately use an accurate “Reply To” email address. The bounces then arguably go into the ether, but any replies arrive as expected. I’m not in love with this solution, as one could argue it’s minor-league spoofing, but I’m dropping it here as an idea.

Thanks Matthew, now I have found another reason why we miskey our ‘send from’ email. So these emails are not sent from the execs exact email address and that might have been why they never got a bounce / OOO response in the past. 

Do you know of any other reason why he still got these today and what else I can do to 100% avoid this from happening again?

@lira.b Glad to help. 

As to the specifics of your Program today, I’d only be guessing what might have happened today that caused a different result from your previous sends. Gainsight Support may be your best next step for that diagnosis.

Haven’t seen it either, and we also just a month or so ago sent a high-volume operational from our CEO.

We’ve had a few cases where we’ve sent from a C level (or higher-level), while using a different reply-to address, and just forewarned them to expect to be hit with some OOO replies, and they’re typically good with that tradeoff. We just share the subject line with them so they can filter for it and bulk delete those emails. Same when we CC AOs on CSM email sends.

One thing we’ve considered doing is to create a sender email distro (slightly modified person name) so it appears to be sending (and reply-to) directly from that high-level individual, but able to be accessed by the C-level team for replies.