bots following links in e-mails

[karljeffery]

The click statistics of some of our e-mails have suddenly gone up - I don't think we have suddenly become more popular, I suspect there are bots being used by some of our email recipients which automatically try out links in e-mails, perhaps as a cybersecurity measure. But this means we have no way of knowing how many 'real' people are clicking on the links. Has anyone worked out a way to solve this problem?

[William_A]

Hello @karljeffery ,

If their network or email program uses some kind of security tool that "opens" emails and "clicks" their links to check for malware, it can result in that kind of data. This will be indicated by those contacts clicking all the poll options at the same time, typically within 1-2 minutes of you sending the email.

In all honesty, the only suggestion I'd normally have is to swap your authentication to self-authentication since you have your own domain, however your account is already set up as such. Ideally, this would show the security algorithms that emails being sent through us by you are effectively coming directly from you, and avoid triggering the clicks/opens from bots. 

Beyond that, there's not much else you can do from your end. 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. If the click rates continue to be inflated or worsen, then 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.

[CathyH26]

Hi William thanks yes looking at the click statistics it is pretty obvious which ones are from bots.. although that leads to the issue of the manual work to remove them.. and I can't think of any obvious way to automate it!

Perhaps you could pass the suggestion onto your software developers - make a tool to automatically remove bot driven clicks from the data, which could be defined as more than 3 clicks within the same minute on the same e-mail? 

Thanks

Cheers Karl