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Email inboxes often use automated bots to pre-scan or pre-open emails for security and link safety checks. These bot interactions can inflate your open and click metrics, making it harder to understand how your real recipients are engaging with your emails. Conversion automatically detects and flags bot activity using two complementary sets of rules: proximity rules and IP inspection. Flagged events are filtered out of your performance metrics when the Include bots toggle is turned off on the Performance tab.

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Proximity rules

Proximity rules look at the timing of events for each individual send to identify activity that is too fast to be human. Events are grouped by send (per recipient), sorted by timestamp, and then checked pairwise against two thresholds, both set to 1 second.
RuleDescription
proximity_within_1sIf two open or click events for the same send happen within 1 second of each other, both events are flagged. A human cannot realistically open and click (or perform two actions) that quickly.
open_or_click_within_1s_of_deliveryIf an open or click event lands within 1 second after a Delivered event for the same send, the open or click is flagged. Real recipients almost never act that fast after delivery, so this pattern typically indicates the mail provider pre-fetching or scanning the email.
Both events involved in a proximity_within_1s match are flagged as bot activity, not just one of them.

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IP inspection

Alongside proximity rules, Conversion inspects the IP address associated with each open and click and checks it against a predefined list of known bot IPs. This list is maintained continuously and is built from:
  • Industry best practices. Publicly recognised bot IP ranges, including those from major providers such as Google.
  • Conversion’s own detection. Additional IP addresses identified by Conversion’s internal bot detection algorithms.
Any open or click originating from an IP on this list is flagged as bot activity.
For the most reliable performance data, keep the Include bots toggle off on the Performance tab so that proximity-flagged and IP-flagged events are excluded from your metrics.