Amazon SES Can Now Tell If an Open or Click Was a Bot or a Human!

Hi, it's Shii! Today I found a small but genuinely useful update from Amazon SES. It's about being able to tell whether an email open or click actually came from a real person!

AWS What's New aws.amazon.com

What was announced?

According to AWS What's New, Amazon SES (Simple Email Service) now adds a new isBotEvent field to its Open and Click event notifications. If you publish Open or Click events through a configuration set event destination, this field now shows up in the notification payload.

The field takes one of two values: Likely (the event was probably triggered by an automated system) or Unlikely (it was probably triggered by a human recipient). You can use it as a signal to tell automated interactions apart from real ones.

The story so far

Until now, Open and Click event notifications gave you no way to tell whether an interaction really came from a human, or from something like an email security product or antivirus tool automatically following links. Engagement metrics like open rate and click rate tend to get inflated by this kind of automated scanning, which made it hard to know how accurately those numbers reflected real human behavior.

What changes

With the isBotEvent field, you can now separate out how much of your engagement data is coming from automated systems. That's great news if you're a team measuring email delivery effectiveness, or a developer building systems that trigger actions off opens and clicks - you get to work with cleaner, less noisy data.

Dive Deep

The mechanics are pretty simple.

• Covered events: Open events and Click events
• Values: Likely (probably automated) or Unlikely (probably human)
• How you get it: included in notifications when you use Amazon SNS or Amazon Firehose as your configuration set event destination
• Regions: available in every AWS Region where Amazon SES is available
• Setup: if you're already publishing Open/Click events to an event destination, the field is added automatically - no extra configuration needed

For the full details on the notification payload, check "Contents of event data that Amazon SES publishes to Amazon SNS" and "Contents of event data that Amazon SES publishes to Firehose" in the Amazon SES Developer Guide.

Wrap-up

• Open/Click event notifications now include an isBotEvent field (Likely / Unlikely)
• It's a signal to tell automated interactions apart from human ones
• If you use SNS or Firehose as your event destination, it's added automatically
• Available in every AWS Region

This one's especially handy if you're an engineer keeping a close eye on email engagement metrics, or building automation that reacts to opens and clicks!