Why did a large number of people click a link in my email immediately after sending?
Michael Ko
Co-founder & CEO, Suped
Published 9 Jul 2025
Updated 19 Aug 2025
8 min read
Recently, I noticed something peculiar in my email campaign reports: a significant number of clicks appearing almost immediately after sending, sometimes within seconds. This wasn't typical user behavior, and it often caused an unexpected surge in traffic to the linked pages, even leading to strange activity on our checkout page. If you've encountered similar phantom clicks, you're not alone. This phenomenon is a common indicator of automated systems interacting with your emails, rather than actual human recipients.
The immediate nature of these clicks, often from a broad range of IP addresses or specific data centers, strongly suggests that bots or security filters are at work. These aren't necessarily malicious, but they can certainly skew your engagement metrics, making it challenging to understand your true audience interaction. It's a critical aspect of email deliverability that many email marketers overlook.
Understanding why these automated clicks occur and how to interpret them is crucial for accurate campaign analysis. It's about differentiating genuine human engagement from the background noise of internet security measures.
The role of email security systems
Automated security systems, often referred to as bot clicks, are a primary reason for immediate, widespread link activity. These systems are designed to protect recipients from malicious content like phishing scams, malware, or spam. Before an email even reaches an inbox, or sometimes shortly after, these automated programs will click and scan links to ensure they are safe. This proactive approach helps prevent harmful emails from compromising user security.
Many email providers, including large ones like Gmail, Outlook, and Yahoo, employ sophisticated spam filters that perform these link scans. Corporate environments often have even stricter security gateways that scan every incoming email. This server sniffing or link pre-fetching behavior is a common and expected part of modern email security. It’s important to note that these clicks are not from human subscribers.
Sometimes, these systems click all links within an email, regardless of whether they are visible to the recipient or if they are hidden links or tracking pixels. The goal is to comprehensively check for any potential threat embedded within the message. This means your metrics will often show clicks from destinations that don't match your intended audience's geographic location or typical behavior.
Understanding automated link scanning
Automated link scanning is a fundamental aspect of modern email security, designed to protect users from malicious content. These scans occur rapidly, often before the email even reaches the recipient's inbox, causing a spike in reported clicks.
Proactive defense: Helps prevent phishing attacks and malware distribution by verifying link safety.
Reputation checks: Contributes to the overall security posture of the email system and the sender's domain reputation.
System variations: Different email providers and corporate security solutions have varying levels of aggression in their scanning, leading to diverse click patterns.
Types of automated clickers
The entities performing these automated clicks are primarily email service providers and corporate network security solutions. Each has its own methods and reasons for scanning links.
ESPs use these scans to maintain a secure ecosystem for their users. They aim to catch phishing attempts, spam, and malware at the gateway, preventing them from ever reaching the user's inbox. This helps reduce the overall volume of malicious emails and protects users from accidentally clicking on harmful links. If they identify a suspicious link, the email might be quarantined or sent to the spam folder, protecting the recipient.
Corporate security systems, including firewalls and email gateways, perform similar, often more aggressive, checks. In a business environment, the risk of a successful phishing attack can be severe, leading to data breaches or network compromises. Therefore, these systems are designed to be extremely thorough, often pre-fetching all links to analyze their content and behavior before the email is delivered to the employee. This can sometimes lead to an exaggerated number of recorded clicks, especially if the organization receives a high volume of emails.
ISP scanning
Email service providers (ISPs) like Google and Microsoft automate link clicks to protect their user base from cyber threats. These scans happen at scale across millions of emails daily.
Purpose: Protect individual users from phishing, malware, and spam.
Mechanism: Links are often clicked in a sandboxed environment to analyze their destination and content.
Impact on metrics: Contributes to inflated click rates, often appearing shortly after sending.
Corporate security gateways
Organizations implement their own security gateways and firewalls that aggressively scan all inbound email links. These systems are typically more robust due to the higher stakes in a corporate environment.
Purpose: Protect company networks, data, and employees from advanced persistent threats.
Mechanism: May involve deep packet inspection, URL rewriting, and sandboxing of all links.
Impact on metrics: Can cause very high, immediate, and often repeated clicks from the same corporate IP range, including from Amazon EC2 IP addresses if the system uses AWS infrastructure for scanning.
Impact on email metrics and data interpretation
The most significant impact of these automated clicks is on your email engagement metrics. A sudden, immediate spike in clicks can give a misleading impression of your campaign's performance, inflating your click-through rate (CTR). It becomes difficult to discern genuine human interest from automated scans. This is why it’s important to look beyond raw numbers and analyze other data points, such as engagement metrics.
To get a clearer picture of actual user engagement, I recommend focusing on unique clicks and analyzing click patterns. If you see a high volume of clicks originating from data centers (like Amazon EC2 IPs, especially if you're using AWS for sending and they are scanning their own mailers), or if the clicks occur within milliseconds of delivery, it's highly likely they are automated. These are non-human interactions and should be filtered out when assessing true user engagement.
Unique clicks: Focus on the number of distinct recipients who clicked, rather than total clicks.
Time analysis: Look for clicks occurring immediately after send time, often too fast for human interaction.
IP address geography: Identify clicks from data centers or unexpected geographic locations.
User agent: Check if the user agent strings are generic or indicative of automated processes.
Some email service providers may offer ways to filter out known bot clicks from your reports, which can help provide more accurate metrics for performance analysis. If your ESP does not provide this feature, manual analysis of raw click data might be necessary.
Managing automated clicks and maintaining deliverability
While it can be alarming to see unexpected surges in link clicks, it's typically not a cause for concern regarding your email content or sender reputation. These automated scans are a normal part of the email security landscape. There isn't a direct way to prevent these bot clicks entirely, as they are a necessary defense mechanism.
Instead of trying to stop them, focus on setting realistic expectations for your email metrics. Recognize that your reported click rates will likely include a percentage of automated clicks. Prioritize metrics that truly reflect human engagement, such as conversion rates on your website, time spent on linked pages, or subsequent interactions beyond the initial click. If you're concerned about sudden increases in bot activity, consider exploring resources on troubleshooting bot clicks.
Ensuring your email authentication is correctly set up is also key. Strong SPF, DKIM, and DMARC records signal to these security systems that your emails are legitimate and can help ensure your emails are delivered to the inbox without being flagged as suspicious. Although these measures won't stop the automated clicks, they help build trust with mailbox providers and prevent your emails from ending up on a blocklist or blacklist, which can be far more detrimental.
Understanding what drives immediate link clicks is critical for accurate email marketing analysis. It helps you focus on real human engagement rather than being misled by automated security systems.
Source
Key Observation
Email Geeks
One marketer observed a sudden spike in clicks without changes to their emails, attributing it to bot activity rather than actual user engagement, which is common with security tools.
Email Geeks
An expert found that filters check links by clicking them, and this behavior is widely distributed across various email systems.
Email Geeks
Another expert shared that AWS checks links of their mailers and can flag issues like broken SSL certificates through this process.
These shared experiences underscore the prevalence of automated link checking and its significant influence on email analytics.
Understanding your email's journey
Immediate, widespread link clicks after sending an email are a clear sign of automated security systems at work. These systems, operated by email providers and corporate networks, proactively scan links for potential threats before or shortly after delivery. This is a common and beneficial security measure, protecting recipients from malicious content.
While these clicks can inflate your reported engagement metrics, they don't necessarily indicate an issue with your email content or sender reputation. The key is to understand their nature and adjust your analytical approach. Focus on metrics that reflect genuine human interaction, such as unique clicks over time, and continue to prioritize strong email authentication practices. By doing so, you can gain a more accurate understanding of your campaign performance and maintain a healthy email deliverability standing.
Gmail, 
Outlook, and 
Yahoo, employ sophisticated spam filters that perform these link scans. Corporate environments often have even stricter security gateways that scan every incoming email. This server sniffing or link pre-fetching behavior is a common and expected part of modern email security. It’s important to note that these clicks are not from human subscribers.
Google and 
Microsoft automate link clicks to protect their user base from cyber threats. These scans happen at scale across millions of emails daily.
AWS checks links of their mailers and can flag issues like broken SSL certificates through this process.
