How can I identify and handle bot clicks and opens, particularly from Microsoft/Outlook domains, in email marketing campaigns?
Michael Ko
Co-founder & CEO, Suped
Published 20 Jun 2025
Updated 19 Aug 2025
7 min read
Bot clicks and opens have become a significant challenge for email marketers, particularly those targeting domains like Microsoft and Outlook. These automated interactions, often originating from security scanners and anti-spam filters, can skew your campaign metrics, making it difficult to assess true engagement and optimize your email strategies effectively. Identifying and handling these non-human interactions (NHI) is crucial for maintaining accurate data and protecting your sender reputation.
I'll explain how to detect these bot activities and outline practical strategies to mitigate their impact, ensuring your email marketing efforts are based on reliable data. This includes examining technical indicators and implementing smart segmentation to filter out the noise.
Identifying bot clicks and opens
The first step in addressing bot activity is to accurately identify it. While distinguishing human interactions from automated ones can be challenging, especially with sophisticated bots, several patterns and technical indicators can help. Bot clicks are typically generated by security filters and anti-spam software that scan emails for malicious content before delivery to the recipient's inbox. These automated scans often mimic human behavior to a certain extent, making them harder to spot.
One common indicator is the timing of the click. Bot clicks often occur within seconds of an email being delivered, exhibiting a rapid click event pattern from the same user. This behavior is highly unnatural for human interaction. Another crucial piece of data is the user agent string. While some bots use generic or even spoofed user agents, others might reveal their automated nature through specific patterns or by sending a null user agent. Reviewing your email platform's raw click data for these anomalies can provide valuable insights into how to identify bot user agents.
Geographic location can also be a tell-tale sign. If you see a high volume of clicks originating from data centers or regions unrelated to your target audience, these could be indicators of bot activity. For instance, a surge in clicks from a server farm in a distant country might suggest automated scanning rather than genuine engagement from your local subscribers. The article Email Bot Clicks provides more context on how bot clicks occur.
Example of a suspicious user agent stringHTTP
User-Agent: Mozilla/5.0 (Windows NT 10.0; Win64; x64) AppleWebKit/537.36 (KHTML, like Gecko) Chrome/91.0.4472.124 Safari/537.36 (Automated; SecurityScan)
For Microsoft (Outlook) domains, specifically, there have been reports of increased bot activity due to changes in how they process and scan emails. This can lead to an artificial inflation of click-through rates. Understanding how to comply with Outlook's new sender requirements and their internal workings is becoming increasingly important for marketers. You may notice specific IP ranges or user agents associated with Microsoft's (or Outlook's) security scans, though these can change. You can learn more about unexpected click email events caused by non-human interactions in relevant documentation.
Strategies for handling bot activity
Once identified, handling bot clicks involves a combination of data filtration and strategic campaign adjustments. Simply ignoring them isn't an option, as they can lead to misleading campaign performance metrics and potentially impact your sender reputation by inflating engagement signals or triggering unintended actions like unsubscribes if your unsubscribe link is a simple HTTP GET request. This is why it is important to implement how to prevent bot clicks from hurting your reputation.
To ensure accurate reporting, most Email Service Providers (ESPs) attempt to filter out known bot activity. However, no system is perfect, and you might need to implement your own data cleaning processes. One effective method is to filter out clicks that occur immediately after delivery or originate from known bot IP ranges or user agents. Creating invisible links to identify bot clicks or honeypot traps within your emails can also help. These are links that are hidden from human view but accessible to bots. Anyone who clicks these links can be confidently identified as a bot and excluded from your legitimate engagement metrics.
Consider employing a two-step unsubscribe process rather than a one-click unsubscribe. This can help prevent automated security scans from inadvertently unsubscribing your legitimate recipients. If a bot triggers an unsubscribe, requiring a second confirmation click on a landing page ensures that only human users are removed from your list. This strategy is also useful for clarifying unsubscribe confusion and preventing unintended removals from your lists.
Identifying bot clicks
Rapid clicks: Look for multiple clicks within a few seconds of email delivery, especially from the same IP address or user.
IP address origins: Identify clicks from data centers or countries not aligned with your target audience.
Handling bot activity
Data filtering: Exclude known bot clicks from your reports using time, IP, or user agent rules. Filtering out email bot clicks ensures accurate newsletter reports.
Honeypot links: Embed invisible links to trap and identify bots without affecting human users.
Two-step unsubscribe: Implement a confirmation step for unsubscribes to prevent automated systems from opting out subscribers.
Effective handling of bot clicks also involves proactive measures to improve overall email deliverability. This includes ensuring your email authentication protocols like DMARC, SPF, and DKIM are correctly configured. Strong authentication helps mailbox providers trust your emails, potentially reducing the need for aggressive security scanning that generates bot activity.
Understanding the 'why' and broader implications
Bot clicks and opens occur primarily for security reasons. Mailbox providers, including Microsoft and Outlook, scan incoming emails for phishing links, malware, and spam. This pre-scanning involves automated systems clicking on links and loading images (which registers as an open) to evaluate the content's safety. While beneficial for user protection, it can significantly distort your email metrics.
The impact on your metrics can be substantial. Inflated click rates might lead you to believe a campaign is performing better than it is, resulting in poor decision-making regarding content, subject lines, or call-to-actions. Similarly, artificial open rates can mislead you about subscriber engagement. This false data can hinder your ability to identify what truly resonates with your audience and make data-driven improvements. It's crucial to understand how to avoid false email click and open data.
Moreover, bot activity can sometimes have a negative effect on your sender reputation. While mailbox providers understand that some bot interaction is inevitable, excessive or suspicious bot behavior could potentially trigger their spam filters, leading to lower inbox placement rates. Being proactive in identifying and managing this artificial engagement is vital to ensure your emails reach human inboxes. Monitoring your email blocklist (or blacklist) status is also important to maintain a healthy sender reputation.
Metric
Impact of bot activity
Mitigation strategy
Click-through rate (CTR)
Artificially inflated, misleading actual engagement.
Filter out clicks within 2-3 seconds of delivery.
Open rate
Often inflated due to privacy-focused caching, making it unreliable.
Shift focus to clicks and other engagement metrics for accuracy.
Unsubscribe rate
Potentially inflated if bots click one-click unsubscribe links.
Implement a two-step unsubscribe process to confirm intent.
Ultimately, the goal is to obtain accurate engagement data that reflects real human interaction. This enables better segmentation, more personalized content, and stronger campaign performance. By actively addressing bot clicks and opens, you can refine your understanding of subscriber behavior and make more informed decisions.
Refining your email marketing metrics
Effectively managing bot clicks and opens is an ongoing process that requires continuous monitoring and adaptation. While the email landscape evolves, the core principle remains: strive for data accuracy to truly understand your audience.
By implementing advanced identification techniques and proactive handling strategies, you can minimize the impact of non-human interactions on your email marketing campaigns. This not only cleans up your data but also supports more effective strategy development, leading to genuinely improved engagement and deliverability. Prioritizing these steps will help you achieve more reliable insights and better campaign outcomes.
Views from the trenches
Best practices
Analyze click patterns for unnatural speed and repetition.
Segment recipients based on interaction patterns to identify bots.
Use A/B testing with hidden links to isolate bot activity from human clicks.
Common pitfalls
Relying solely on raw click data for performance evaluation.
Failing to account for security scans when measuring engagement.
Using one-click unsubscribe links without confirmation, leading to bot unsubscribes.
Expert tips
Focus on post-click engagement metrics, such as website visits or conversions.
Implement advanced server-side bot detection on landing pages.
Collaborate with your ESP to understand their bot filtering mechanisms.
Expert view
Expert from Email Geeks says opens are nearly impossible to detect accurately due to caching and privacy measures, but clicks, used for spam and malware filtering, are not cached and can be distinguished.
2024-07-09 - Email Geeks
Expert view
Expert from Email Geeks says when analyzing click data, focus on timestamps, as most non-human interaction clicks occur immediately at delivery time. For landing pages, observe user agent behavior, bot detection service flags, and JavaScript execution.
Microsoft and Outlook. These automated interactions, often originating from security scanners and anti-spam filters, can skew your campaign metrics, making it difficult to assess true engagement and optimize your email strategies effectively. Identifying and handling these non-human interactions (NHI) is crucial for maintaining accurate data and protecting your sender reputation.
Outlook's) security scans, though these can change. You can learn more about unexpected click email events caused by non-human interactions in relevant documentation.
