A Note on E-mail Open Tracking On Sends from AWS - SES to Gmail - Google Apps
Related to: Email Tracking - Amazon Aws - Ses
When we send an email to a Gmail or Google Apps account, sometimes it will track an opening at the same time as the delivery.
Most of the time, that’s not a user opening the email but a Google bot fetching the tracking pixel of an email.
So, to get the actual open data, we need to filter out or at least mark the auto open as a bot or automatic action.
In my research, I discovered that all those auto opens come with the following user agent, and I use it to flag the event as an automatic event.
Mozilla/5.0 (Windows NT 10.0; Win64; x64) AppleWebKit/537.36 (KHTML, like Gecko) Chrome/42.0.2311.135 Safari/537.36 Edge/12.246 Mozilla/5.0
Just a tip: the actual user opens will come from various user agents, but they all have the GoogleImageProxy somewhere in them.
Check the example below:
Mozilla/5.0 (Windows NT 5.1; rv:11.0) Gecko Firefox/11.0 (via ggpht.com GoogleImageProxy)