Amazon SES has added bot detection to email open and click tracking, which lets you know whether your email was read or clicked by a human or a bot. If you use Amazon SES and have suspected that AI agents or bots may be driving up your email open or click rates, you may find this feature helpful.
Amazon says Open and Click event notifications will now include an isBotEvent field. The field will contain either Likely or Unlikely, indicating the likelihood that the event was generated by an automated system.
If you have never used Amazon SES, when you send email through Amazon SES, you can choose to publish sending events to an event destination. These events can include deliveries, bounces, complaints, opens, and clicks. Amazon SES sends the event information as structured data, which your systems can then process.
An Open event can include details such as when the event occurred, the recipient’s IP address, and the email client’s user agent. A Click event can include similar information, along with the link that was clicked.
Amazon SES will now add:
isBotEvent: Likely
or
isBotEvent: Unlikely
If you already send Amazon SES Open or Click events to an event destination, you do not need to change your SES configuration. Amazon says the isBotEvent field will be included automatically in those event notifications.
You may still need to make changes if your reporting or marketing systems process SES event data. For example, if your system currently treats every Click event as a human interaction, you can update that logic to check the isBotEvent value. You could then report likely automated activity separately or use the signal when deciding how to score engagement.
Read more on how to configure Amazon SES content events.
