Hi.

I wonder if someone can help me with regards to Spam Filters and how they react to active links embedded into HTML emails.

What I want to know is do some Spam Filters effectively 'open' active links when checking emails and, if so, is that going to register with the sender as a 'click' in exactly the same way as if the recipient opened the link themselves?

I can't seem to find any helpful information about this on the web.  Does anyone know anything more about this subject?

Many thanks

Katie

Hi Katie & Sean

On this subject, there are also some monitoring companies who's activity will like all your links are being clicked on in your reporting.

These companies gather competitor intelligence by adding a record to your list.  They then monitor everything that is sent to it to work out:

• How often you send
• What time of day you send
• What you send, including where you link to

An example of a company could include:

http://www.emaildatasource.com/products.shtml

Hope this is helpful

Paul
Marketing Director
www.adestra.co.uk

On 21:06:50 22 November 2007 SeanDuffy wrote:

Hi Katie,

The answer is yes - we have seen this on a very small number of emails. We can tell because say a newsletter has 100 tracked links in one person appears to have clicked on all 100 exactly once. However this is a very rare occurance - probably around 1 in every 250,000 or so.

Sean Duffy
www.emailcenteruk.com

Hi Katie,

Yes this can be a problem when it comes to accurate tracking and reporting. dotMailer has implemented an 'agent filtering'  solution to prevent these automated clicks from skewing click-through reports.

For example, ClamAV is an anti virus system installed on email servers, that follows links looking for viruses as if the recipient was making the click themselves.

When a web browser requests a page, it inlcudes a User Agent field to identify the program asking for the page. Because ClamAV identify themselves with their User Agent,  we've been able modify our tracking system to ignore these automated clicks. We hold a growing list of these Agent IDs, enabling us to filter out the noise from your click-through reports.

Regards
Cliff Guy
www.dotmailer.co.uk

On 16:04:09 22 November 2007 KatieH wrote:

Hi.

I wonder if someone can help me with regards to Spam Filters and how they react to active links embedded into HTML emails.

What I want to know is do some Spam Filters effectively 'open' active links when checking emails and, if so, is that going to register with the sender as a 'click' in exactly the same way as if the recipient opened the link themselves?

I can't seem to find any helpful information about this on the web.  Does anyone know anything more about this subject?

Many thanks

Katie