Sudden spike in opens/clicks right after campaign send (Bot activity?)

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My Mautic version is: 5.0.4
My PHP version is: 8.2+

Hi everyone,

I’m using Mautic 5.x and recently sent a campaign to about 1,000+ contacts. Immediately after sending, I noticed that open and click counts shot up within seconds — much faster than any realistic user engagement.

After checking the logs, I found that multiple actions came from IPs like:
136.227.178.3
118.194.228.7

and user-agents such as:

Mozilla/5.0 (Windows NT 10.0; Win64; x64) AppleWebKit/537.36 (KHTML, like Gecko) Chrome/130.0.0.0 Safari/537.36

According to IP lookup, these seem to belong to data center / hosting providers (for example, “The Constant Company, LLC”), which suggests these might be email security bots or link scanners opening the messages before they reach the recipient’s inbox.

My questions:

  1. Why does Mautic register these as real opens/clicks — can it differentiate bots?
  2. Is there a recommended way to filter or flag such bot activity in Mautic 5+?
  3. Are there known best practices or plugins to minimize this (e.g., open tracking delay, unique tokens, header changes)?
1 Like
2

I think we all have the same issue, and yes, is something that I have to live with also.

If someone tells me how to recognize bots from humans, I might build a plugin to handle that before december.