Find Out If Your Email Platform Can Tell a Bot From a Reader
Security scanners can click the links in your campaigns before a person ever sees them, and Apple Mail Privacy Protection loads your open pixel whether anyone reads the message or not. Some email platforms filter that activity out of your reports. Others hand you the raw count and call it an open rate. This guide ranks all 33 email platforms best to worst on how they handle bots, and tells you what to do with the grade yours got.
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See Where Your Platform Ranks
The leaderboard ranks all 33 email platforms from best to worst at keeping bot clicks and Apple Mail Privacy Protection opens out of your metrics, with a one-line reason for every grade.
Know What to Check in Your Account
Every platform page has the same rows: Bot clicks, Bot opens, What you see, The verdict, and the Source. The What you see row names what to look for in your own account.
Know What to Do With Your Grade
Strong, Partial, Weak, or None, each grade comes with a next step. Turn on a filter that was sitting switched off, or quit leaning on an open rate your platform has no way to verify.
Written for email marketers and newsletter operators who report open and click rates to a client or a boss. Every grade shows where its evidence came from.
Two kinds of machine activity end up in an email report. Security scanners and bot networks click through your links as the campaign lands, sometimes before the recipient has looked at it, and Apple’s Mail Privacy Protection fetches your tracking pixel on its own servers whether anyone opens the message or not. Unless your platform filters them out, both get counted in the open and click rates you put in front of clients.
Find your platform by band (creator and small business, mid-market, enterprise, or send-only services), read its one page, and you’ll know what your numbers include. Where a platform has no documentation on bot handling, the page says so and lists exactly what we searched.
- ✓ Is your email platform filtering bots at all? The leaderboard ranks all 33 platforms from Strong down to None, with the reason for each grade in one line, so you can see where yours sits in seconds.
- ✓ Which number in your dashboard is the filtered one? Each platform page answers that in its What you see row, and says so plainly when a platform gives you nothing to check.
- ✓ Could the filter be switched off in your account? Some platforms have the feature and leave it off by default, or put it behind an admin role or a higher plan. The Partial grades say what’s holding each one back.
- ✓ Sending through SendGrid, Mailgun, Postmark, or Amazon SES? Those four send-only services are ranked alongside the marketing platforms and tagged send-only. Mailgun and Amazon SES put a bot field on each event; Postmark and SendGrid document none.
- ✓ Does your platform document nothing at all? Platforms that document nothing about bots, like Keap, sit at the bottom as None, and the page lists where we looked.
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How This Guide Was Built
Jeff Sauer built and ran a digital marketing agency before founding MeasureU, where he has trained 50,000+ marketers. For this guide, the MeasureU team went through each platform’s help center and developer documentation on September 22 and 23, 2026, and graded every one of the 33, even the platforms with nothing documented. Every platform page shows its source. Where the platform documents its bot handling, the page links that doc; where nothing is documented, the page says so and lists what we searched.
Look up your email platform’s grade before your next report goes out
Download the guide, find your platform on the leaderboard, and open the setting its page points you to. If you land on a Partial, the fix could be a single switch.