Automatic link clicks by security scanners distort statistics

[Rico]

Hi Team,

we noticed that in our newsletter tracking some clicks are recorded even though the recipient mailboxes no longer exist. After checking the server logs, it turned out that the requests come very quickly one after another from the same IP and often without any referrer.

The root cause maybe are security/spam gateways (e.g. Proofpoint, Barracuda, Mimecast, etc.) which automatically scan all links inside incoming emails to check for malware or phishing.

At the moment, these requests are not filtered by The Newsletter Plugin. It would be very useful to have an option or hook to better identify and exclude such automated clicks.

The problem is that, in my access logs, the user agent does not clearly identify a bot. Therefore, it might be useful to have an option to ignore logs when multiple links are clicked within very short time intervals from the same user agent and IP.

[Michael]

Hello Rico,

I also think that the one you suggested might be the only workaround to at least mitigate the security bots altering the campaign statistics. I’ve passed this to our developers (which, by the way, are already aware of this) for further evaluation.

We of course thank you for your kind feedback.

Michael

[Author]

Posts