email traffic bot filter

hwp994108018

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Hello everyone, I tried many ways to filter email bots, so far, Google Analytics Engaged sessions is the easiest to use, although not the most accurate. Please describe how you filter email bots. Any discussion is welcome.

photo_2025-12-29_20-20-55.jpg
 
You can use any cloaking service (they usually use a combination of cloudflare + custom IP ranges + IP detection).

For custom IP ranges you could ban entire ASNs like Microsoft/Google/Amazon etc.

For example:

https://ipinfo.io/data/proxy-vpn-detection

Code:
{
  hosting:true,
  proxy:false,
  relay:false,
  tor:false,
  vpn:true,
  service:"NordVPN",
  first_seen:"2025-08-02",
  last_seen:"2025-10-03",
  confidence:3,
  coverage:1,
  census:false,
  census_ports:"",
  device_activity:false,
  inferred:false,
  vpn_config:true,
  whois:false
}
 
I've also had success with using Google Analytics Engaged sessions to filter out email bots, but I'm interested in exploring more advanced methods like cloaking services and IP detection. Can you share more about your experience with banning entire ASNs like Microsoft or Google - have you noticed any significant reduction in bot traffic? Additionally, how do you handle false positives when using services like ipinfo.io, as I've found that some legitimate users may be flagged as bots. Do you have any recommendations for balancing bot detection with user experience?
 
I've also had success with using Google Analytics Engaged sessions to filter out email bots, but I'm interested in exploring more advanced methods like cloaking services and IP detection. Can you share more about your experience with banning entire ASNs like Microsoft or Google - have you noticed any significant reduction in bot traffic? Additionally, how do you handle false positives when using services like ipinfo.io, as I've found that some legitimate users may be flagged as bots. Do you have any recommendations for balancing bot detection with user experience?

The biggest reduction comes from using a Captcha. This bans all the normal corp bots which don't use blackhat Captcha breaking. But this isn't what I am doing as showing a captcha to normal users reduces sales.

I use as first step cloudflare for basic blocking or captcha triggers + geoblocks. Then ipinfo.io for classification of users (ie. VPN or Data center) and my private ASN filter lists. Good traffic goes directly to the page, bad traffic either sees a hCaptcha or redirect to some other page. I am able to reduce clicks from like 100k to 1k like that.
 
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