Should I block or accept click tracking and bots, and what are the implications for email deliverability and unsubscribe links?

Email marketer from Neil Patel explains that bot traffic can skew analytics, making it difficult to accurately assess user engagement and conversion rates. They recommend using bot filtering tools to clean up data and get a clearer picture of campaign performance.

Email marketer from Reddit forum r/emailmarketing shares their experience dealing with bot clicks inflating their open rates and suggests implementing a CAPTCHA on unsubscribe pages to prevent bots from accidentally unsubscribing users. They explain it is worth slightly hurting the user experience to ensure they have clean, actionable, user data.

Email marketer from ZeroBounce explains how to use email validation services to detect and remove invalid or bot-generated email addresses from your list. This helps prevent sending to spam traps and improves deliverability.

Email marketer from ActiveCampaign shares best practices to segment your audience based on engagement and exclude inactive users or those who consistently trigger bot detection. This helps maintain a cleaner list and improve deliverability.

Email marketer from Mailchimp explains that they automatically filter out bot clicks to provide cleaner analytics. They advise users to be cautious about one-click unsubscribe links to prevent accidental unsubscriptions from bots.

Email marketer from Litmus explains how the one-click unsubscribe functionality is important for compliance but notes that it's essential to monitor unsubscribe rates for anomalies. Significant spikes might indicate bot activity, warranting further investigation.

Email marketer from Email on Acid shares the importance of pre-flight checks including link validation, which identifies broken or suspicious links, often triggered by bot scans. Addressing these issues improves deliverability.

Email marketer from SendGrid shares that bot traffic can negatively impact sender reputation if bots trigger spam traps or generate false engagement metrics. They recommend monitoring traffic and implementing bot detection measures to maintain a healthy sender reputation.

Email marketer from StackExchange suggests rate-limiting bot activity on unsubscribe pages to mitigate unintended consequences. It helps prevent rapid-fire unsubscriptions by malicious bots without impacting legitimate user interactions.

Email marketer from HubSpot shares that click tracking is essential for understanding email engagement, but it's crucial to filter out bot clicks to avoid inflated metrics. They suggest using advanced analytics to identify and exclude bot traffic for more accurate reporting.

Expert from Email Geeks says that anything that makes a change on a webpage MUST be triggered by a POST request from user interaction. If you have a GET that changes persistent state your web app is irrecoverably broken.

Expert from Email Geeks explains that clicks should be allowed, but treated differently in user reporting. Blocking them could make your mail seem high risk, as it mimics malware evasion tactics.

Expert from Word to the Wise explains click tracking is useful, but you should exclude anything that isn't a genuine click from your reporting. Clicks coming from bots and malware scans do not represent a human user viewing your message.

Expert from Email Geeks clarifies the term 'one-click unsubscribe'. It doesn't mean you can't require *any* webpage interaction, but rather not require *multiple steps* on the webpage to unsubscribe. Confusing the term lead to a lot of bad advice.

Expert from Email Geeks states that bots follow links to look for malware or phishing on landing pages. Making them trivial to identify would allow bad actors to serve different content to bots and humans.

Expert from Email Geeks states that identifying bots is not trivial as some bots are full headless browsers running with JavaScript and network access enabled in an isolated one-shot sandbox.

Expert from Spamresource explains that honeypots will engage with links and any engagement counts against you.

Expert from Email Geeks explains that if a mailing list implements a one-click unsubscribe, there's a risk of Non-Human Interaction (NHI) clicks unsubscribing users silently.

Documentation from IETF explains the List-Unsubscribe header, which allows recipients to unsubscribe from mailing lists. Implementing both mailto: and HTTP unsubscribe options, with the latter requiring a POST request, can help mitigate bot-induced unsubscriptions.

Documentation from Spamhaus explains how spam traps are designed to catch spammers and bots. Interacting with these traps can severely damage sender reputation, highlighting the need to filter bot traffic.

Documentation from Google Search Central explains that Google uses crawlers to discover and index web pages. Blocking these crawlers can prevent your content from appearing in search results, negatively impacting organic traffic and potentially affecting deliverability if search engines can't verify your site's legitimacy.

Documentation from RFC Editor explains that per HTTP standards, actions that modify server-side state (like unsubscribing a user) SHOULD be performed using the POST method, not GET. Using GET for such actions can lead to unintended consequences due to bot activity.