Sudden spike in open rate (Not natural)

[Ahmed]

Hi i use mailwhizz almost once a week (i also use aweber)

Im looking at the stats and it doesnt seem normal

Im suddenly getting a very large open rate (i would love this to be true but it looks like something is up) its almost every time emails are sent then opens are being logged

User agents,IP's, time stamps all showing as the same

image is attahced (Im using sparkpost as smtp)

Ive seen this happen a couple times before but did not post about it as it went back to normal - but this way im really not able to guage the true engagement

 

[Ahmed]

looks like the IP's are all the same for the gmail accounts

 

[twisted1919]

Just block that ip address from tracking so it won't mess up your stats.

 

[Dev1@OptiBiz1]

@Ahmed That IP address is most likely a google image proxy, even though the user-agent didn't explicitly say GoogleImageProxy. https://ipinfo.io/66.249.87.91

https://sendloop.com/articles/the-effect-of-gmail-image-proxy-to-email-marketers/
---
Gmail is downloading images whenever your very first email hits their servers, and before it’s delivered to the recipient’s inbox. When all images are downloaded, the email open tracking image is also downloaded and cached.

This causes all email opens to be detected from (google). As a consequence, email open detections are inaccurate, which in turn, definitely affects email senders who measure their metrics and optimize their follow-up deliveries.
---

In other words, those opens are not from actual person but from a "bot"

 

[Ahmed]

should I still block this? last 5 or so broadcast campaigns I sent didnt have this issue

 

[Diegoweb]

@twisted1919
Hi I tried blocking the IPs, but now it does not register any open on gmail.com web, the only opens registered now are when the user has an email client software but not in gmail.com web version. So blocking the IP its worthless because it wont register any open on gmail.com.
Maybe the solution is having the ability to block the user agent combined with the ip?
Next i will try to do a manual clean up of the fake opens on the DB to see if that work to give me real open reports.

 

[twisted1919]

@Diegoweb - we have a hook in place for that area, if you'd like to play with the user agent stuff, i can give you a code snippet to place in apps/init-custom.php and you can place your logic there and see if that makes any difference.

 

[Scott]

@twisted1919 would you mind sharing your code snippet for this? I'm having the same issues with some broadcasts.

 

[twisted1919]

@Scott - here's an example:

<?php

Yii::app()->hooks->addFilter('frontend_campaigns_can_track_opening', function($canTrack, $controller, $campaigns){

    $ip = Yii::app()->request->getUserHostAddress();
    $ua = Yii::app()->request->getUserAgent();

    // if the user agent contains the words "mountain view", do not track
    if (stripos($ua, 'mountain view') !== false) {
        $canTrack = false;
    }
    
    return $canTrack;
});