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Filtering Email Bot Activity in Adobe campaign Classic

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Level 3

Hi All,

Is it possible to filter out any activity performed by Bots (such as opening email, clicking of links etc) on emails sent from Adobe campaign classic.

1 Accepted Solution

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Correct answer by
Community Advisor

Given there are virtually unlimited number of domains and email addresses attached to them, bots  are engineered to crawl email links in an attempt to find malicious links, there are virtually limitless number of bots with different kind of configuration on all email platforms which makes any attempt at detecting bots worthless.

 

You could perform a small scale research by doing the following.

 

  1. Create set of addresses on major email providers (outlook, yahoo, gmail) they will be unmonitored (noone to check inbound email)
  2. Send a daily/weekly email at different intervals of the day
  3. Monitor tracking on these emails through nms:trackingLogRcp schema
  4. Collect browser agent details which contains (uuid, browser version, broser key)
  5. After x number of weeks/months you have enough data collected on your honeypot to at least exclude these uuids from your tracking reports.

 

I performed a small test, sent my self a couple of emails to different addresses without opening them and gathered the following data, only the two highlighted belong to my opens & clicks, the rest were bots which crawled my email, you need to bear in mind that, bots can change and use any kind of user agent configuration, but at least this aims at narrowing it down to at least try to estimate which are bots browser agents/uuids

 

David__Garcia_0-1639430625282.png

 

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3 Replies

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Level 2

Hi,

 

Hope you are doing well.

 

As per our understanding, this could not be possible as the campaign doesn’t have any way to identify that this email is open by BOT or by a recipient targeted. Adobe campaign has a small image in the email which gets downloaded once the email is open.

 

Concerning links it tracks it using redirection URL and hence it could not tell if any bot has opened the link or not.

 

Still is you want to see any ongoing issue with the product then you could always follow this page: https://status.adobe.com/

 

Regards,

Akshey Malhotra

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Correct answer by
Community Advisor

Given there are virtually unlimited number of domains and email addresses attached to them, bots  are engineered to crawl email links in an attempt to find malicious links, there are virtually limitless number of bots with different kind of configuration on all email platforms which makes any attempt at detecting bots worthless.

 

You could perform a small scale research by doing the following.

 

  1. Create set of addresses on major email providers (outlook, yahoo, gmail) they will be unmonitored (noone to check inbound email)
  2. Send a daily/weekly email at different intervals of the day
  3. Monitor tracking on these emails through nms:trackingLogRcp schema
  4. Collect browser agent details which contains (uuid, browser version, broser key)
  5. After x number of weeks/months you have enough data collected on your honeypot to at least exclude these uuids from your tracking reports.

 

I performed a small test, sent my self a couple of emails to different addresses without opening them and gathered the following data, only the two highlighted belong to my opens & clicks, the rest were bots which crawled my email, you need to bear in mind that, bots can change and use any kind of user agent configuration, but at least this aims at narrowing it down to at least try to estimate which are bots browser agents/uuids

 

David__Garcia_0-1639430625282.png

 

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Employee Advisor

Email bots (usually) won't log into your App or website. You could always take email clickers and exclude anyone who has not logged in or authenticated on your domains.