This isn't strictly a question about Sender Certification but I'm asking here because I understand the Sender Certification includes an integration with Vade and Proofpoint and expect the community here might have of their usual good insight to share.
We have noticed a big uptick in clicks in emails this year. We have some evidence that a good part of these are coming from end point protection systems installed on the recipient ESPs. For example we can see in the MX records that some are configured to point to Barracuda, we believe others bots are from Proofpoint and Checkpoint. We believe these bots are "clicking" the links in the emails, following our clicktracking redirects and landing on the destination site and scanning it for threats. We understand why someone would want to do this but from our point of view it is quite undesirable as it throws off engagement reporting.
Some questions:
1. Any ideas on how to detect these robotic clicks in order to exclude them from engagement reports? Our CDN has a bot score function so we are considering acting on that, it would be a bit experimental on our part.
2. Assuming we could identify them would it be wise to either block them or to present a captcha? We have some fear that blocking them would make us look more suspicious as they would not be able to verify that our landing pages were free from threats. Perhaps a captcha would also face this risk.
3. Does the participation in the Sender Certification program offer any signal via Vade or any other partner that robotic probes are not necessary?
