Email is being opened and clicked on by random IP addresses

[Chelsea_Petre]

Hi there, 

I sent an email out on behalf of a client, with her email address in the from and reply fields. I then noticed she had unsubscribed, but she said she did not click on the unsubscribe link. After looking at her activity log, from when the email was sent, over the next 5 days, the email was clicked on up to 14 times per day by different IP addresses, and had a couple of those clicks lead to unsubscribes. I have no idea how or why something like this would happen - can someone please shed some light on this? Thanks so much! 

[SanfordWhiteman]

Hi Chelsea,

Non-human clicks are a very common phenomenon. Anti-malware mail scanners will click links on behalf of users, not just before initial delivery but multiple times after delivery (as long as the email is still in a server-side mailbox).

It's for this reason that Clicked Email activities are close to useless except as broad (very broad) indicators of engagement trends in certain markets.

And you definitely can't have a simple click result in an automatic unsubscribe — is that what you're currently doing, using Clicked Link to trigger setting Unsubscribed=true? (Or autosubmitting a form, which is the equivalent.)