I haven't seen this occur for direct Gmail addresses before, and I'm not currently finding anything in their support areas that would suggest their system would be triggering link clicks and open-tracking pixel downloads to scan for malware. I'm wondering if those particular Gmail contacts have something else on their end that would be doing that, or if they're accessing their personal Gmail accounts on private networks that employ those functions.
It may be worth reaching out to those contacts, to see if they'd be able to safelist your address, as that can avoid the security click triggers, depending on the program used. Otherwise for the corporate contacts, you may want to reach out to their IT to see if they can make sure you're safelisted in their system? Beyond that, since you're already setup for self-authentication, there's not much else you'd be able to do from your end to mitigate this.
You could also try identifying and isolating the contacts using these security bot clicks, and add them to lists denoting they're using such programs. Then you could send copies of your email to the bot versions of your lists, so you're still getting the message sent, but they're not skewing the data of your main sendout. Or, if you feel the contacts aren't actually worthwhile, then your other option is to delete them.
Our devs are constantly trying to identify the various programs that utilize this functionality, so they can set our system to ignore the behavior and triggers from these particular programs. Since you've already self-authenticated, it may be worth calling in. That way our general support or higher level technical team can see if there's any further info that can be gleamed from the content of the emails with you live on the phone, or to see if the domains of the contacts that are seeming to bot-click them show any other particular consistencies we can track.
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