How to identify and filter out email bot clicks from newsletter reports?
Michael Ko
Co-founder & CEO, Suped
Published 20 Jul 2025
Updated 18 Aug 2025
6 min read
Email bot clicks have become a significant challenge for marketers and deliverability professionals. What often appears as a sudden surge in clicks on your newsletter reports might not be genuine human engagement at all, but rather automated scripts scanning your emails.
These automated interactions, often initiated by security software or email filters, are designed to check for malicious links or viruses before an email lands in a recipient's inbox. While beneficial for security, they inflate your email metrics, making it difficult to gauge true subscriber engagement and campaign performance.
Understanding how to identify and filter out these misleading clicks is crucial for accurate reporting and effective email strategy. Let's explore the common characteristics of bot activity and actionable steps to clean up your data.
Understanding email bot clicks
Email bot clicks (also known as non-human interactions) are automated responses to links within your emails. They are not performed by a human subscriber but by software programs, often referred to as web crawlers or security scanners.
The primary purpose of these bots is to proactively identify and prevent phishing links, malware, or other security threats from reaching a user's inbox. They do this by clicking every link in an email to test its destination and content for anything suspicious. This is a common practice across various mailbox providers and corporate security systems, including those used by Mimecast.
While beneficial for security, these actions distort your email marketing metrics. They inflate click-through rates, making campaigns appear more successful than they are, and can lead to misinformed decisions about content, calls to action, and audience segmentation. It's essential to differentiate these artificial interactions from genuine engagement for accurate analysis.
The impact of bot clicks
Bot clicks can significantly skew your email campaign metrics, leading to inaccurate insights into subscriber behavior. Understanding their impact is the first step toward better data.
Inflated metrics: Bot clicks artificially boost your click-through rates (CTR), making it seem like your campaigns are performing better than they truly are. This can lead to false positives when evaluating campaign effectiveness.
Misleading A/B tests: If bot activity isn't filtered, your A/B test results may show a winning variant based on bot engagement, not human preference, leading to suboptimal campaign optimizations.
Distorted segmentation: Basing segmentation on engagement data that includes bot clicks can result in miscategorizing active subscribers, potentially leading to incorrect targeting or re-engagement strategies.
Impact on deliverability: While bot clicks don't directly hurt deliverability in the same way spam traps do, they can obscure real deliverability issues by masking low human engagement.
Identifying email bot click patterns
Identifying bot clicks requires careful observation of specific patterns that differentiate them from human interaction.
One of the most telling signs is a sudden surge in clicks immediately after an email is sent. This rapid-fire clicking, often within seconds or milliseconds of delivery, is characteristic of automated security scanners. Real human behavior tends to be more spread out over time.
Another strong indicator is when a single recipient appears to click every single link in an email, including social media icons, unsubscribe links, and primary calls to action, all within an extremely short timeframe. This behavior is highly improbable for a human user. You can gain further insights into detecting suspicious interactions by learning how to identify suspicious bot clicks.
Examining user-agent strings or IP addresses associated with these clicks can also reveal patterns. While some bots mimic standard browsers, others may have distinct user-agent strings that flag them as automated. Similarly, clicks originating from data centers or known security scanning services often indicate bot activity. Many ESPs use algorithms to filter these clicks, but you can also gain valuable information by learning how to identify bot user agents.
Characteristic
Human behavior
Bot behavior
Timing of clicks
Clicks spread out over minutes or hours after send.
Immediate clicks (within seconds or milliseconds) of email delivery.
Number of links clicked
Typically clicks on 1-3 primary links or calls to action.
Clicks on virtually every link in the email, including footers and hidden links.
IP address/User-agent
Associated with common ISPs, residential IPs, and standard browser user-agents.
Often from data centers, cloud providers, or specific security scanner user-agents. You can learn more about Microsoft/Outlook bot clicks.
Conversion/Follow-up
Clicks often lead to further website engagement, sign-ups, or purchases.
Clicks rarely lead to any subsequent engagement or conversion actions.
Filtering bot clicks from reports
Filtering out email bot clicks requires a multi-faceted approach, often combining automated tools and manual analysis. Many email service providers (ESPs) offer built-in bot filtering features. These tools typically use sophisticated algorithms to detect and exclude bot activity based on patterns like rapid clicks, suspicious IP ranges, and user-agent strings. You can also explore strategies for combating spam filter and bot clicks.
If your ESP lacks robust filtering, you might need to implement custom solutions. A common technique is to exclude clicks that occur within a very short time frame (e.g., less than 1 second) after the email is sent. This can be done by integrating your email platform with a custom webhook or middleware that processes click events and filters them based on timestamps or other metadata. This also helps you avoid false email click and open data.
For very specific filtering, you could analyze the raw log data to identify and exclude clicks from suspicious IP ranges or user-agent strings. This approach is more technical but offers granular control. However, it's worth noting that relying solely on IP or user-agent filtering can be tricky, as bots can spoof these identifiers, and a lot of legitimate activity happens on various devices.
Manual review and analysis
Timeframe analysis: Manually review clicks occurring within seconds of email delivery. Any click recorded within 100-1000 milliseconds of the SMTP request is highly suspicious.
Behavioral patterns: Look for recipients who click every link in an email simultaneously. This is a strong indicator of automated scanning activity.
IP and user-agent: While less reliable on their own, consistently identify clicks from known data center IPs or unusual user-agent strings.
Manual analysis can be time-consuming but offers deep insight into specific bot behaviors, especially for smaller lists or critical campaigns. It's often used in conjunction with automated methods.
Honeypot links: Embed invisible links (same color as background) in your emails. Any clicks on these links are almost certainly bots and can be automatically excluded. You can learn how to use honeypots effectively.
Webhook integration: Set up webhooks to receive real-time click data. Programmatically filter out clicks based on timing, IP, or user-agent patterns.
Automated solutions are scalable and provide a more consistent approach to cleaning your data, reducing the manual effort involved.
Advanced mitigation strategies
Beyond basic filtering, consider advanced mitigation strategies to ensure the highest data integrity. One method involves using CAPTCHAs or reCAPTCHAs on your email sign-up forms. While this doesn't filter clicks directly, it helps prevent bot email addresses from entering your list in the first place, reducing the overall volume of bot interactions with your campaigns.
Another powerful strategy is to segment your audience based on engagement levels that exclude bot clicks. By analyzing true human engagement, you can create more refined segments, ensuring your most active subscribers receive tailored content. This helps you accurately measure email engagement.
Regularly monitoring your deliverability and engagement trends using tools like Google Postmaster Tools can help you spot anomalies. While these tools might not explicitly flag bot clicks, significant discrepancies between their reported metrics and your internal numbers (after filtering) could indicate areas needing further investigation. Remember, the goal is to obtain the clearest possible picture of your genuine audience.
function isBotClick(clickEvent) {
const SMTP_DELIVERY_TIME = clickEvent.smtpTimestamp;
const CLICK_TIME = clickEvent.clickTimestamp;
const TIME_DIFFERENCE = CLICK_TIME - SMTP_DELIVERY_TIME;
// Filter out clicks within 1 second of SMTP delivery
if (TIME_DIFFERENCE < 1000) {
return true;
}
// Check for suspicious user-agents
const USER_AGENT = clickEvent.userAgent.toLowerCase();
if (USER_AGENT.includes('bot') || USER_AGENT.includes('crawler') || USER_AGENT.includes('scanner')) {
return true;
}
// Check if multiple links clicked instantly
if (clickEvent.linksClicked.length > 5 && clickEvent.timeBetweenClicks < 100) {
return true;
}
return false;
}
Achieving accurate email insights
Effectively managing email bot clicks is vital for maintaining accurate newsletter reports and making data-driven decisions. By understanding the nature of these automated interactions and implementing appropriate identification and filtering techniques, you can gain a much clearer picture of your actual subscriber engagement.
Whether you rely on your ESP's built-in features, implement custom filters based on timing and behavior, or utilize honeypot links, the goal remains the same: to distinguish human clicks from automated ones. This clarity empowers you to optimize your campaigns, segment your audience more effectively, and ultimately improve your email marketing ROI.
Continuously monitor your metrics and adapt your strategies as bot behavior evolves. Staying proactive ensures your reports reflect genuine interactions, providing valuable insights for your overall deliverability and marketing success.
Views from the trenches
Best practices
Exclude any clicks occurring within milliseconds of email send time, as these are highly indicative of bot activity.
Utilize honeypot links, which are hidden links invisible to humans, to capture and filter out bot clicks.
Leverage your ESP's native bot filtering features; they often have sophisticated algorithms for detection.
Segment your audience based on genuine engagement after filtering out bot activity for more accurate targeting.
Regularly review your email analytics for unusual click patterns or spikes to proactively identify bot interference.
Common pitfalls
Relying solely on user-agent or IP address filtering, as bots can spoof these, leading to inaccurate results.
Over-filtering legitimate clicks, which can happen if your filtering criteria are too aggressive or broadly applied.
Ignoring the problem, which leads to inflated metrics and misinformed marketing decisions.
Not considering the impact of bot clicks on A/B testing, resulting in false positives for campaign optimization.
Failing to adapt filtering methods as bot technologies evolve, requiring continuous refinement of your approach.
Expert tips
Consider that a lot of legitimate email activity happens on various devices, making IP/user-agent filtering less precise.
Focus on filtering clicks that happen in quick succession, as this is a stronger indicator of automated behavior.
Monitor for changes in bot activity by breaking down clicks by recipient mailbox provider if sudden spikes occur.
Use webhook integration with your ESP to capture real-time click events and apply custom filtering logic.
Remember that bot clicks are typically security-driven and not inherently harmful to your sender reputation.
Marketer view
Marketer from Email Geeks says that having clicks on every single link, especially social links in the footer, is a strong indication of bot activity.
2024-04-12 - Email Geeks
Marketer view
Marketer from Email Geeks says that corporate firewalls and spam filters are known to automatically click every link in an email, confirming the suspicion of bot activity.
