False open trackings using SES and gmail

Question

I'm having a problem with Amazon's SES Open Tracking and Gmail accounts.

When I send an email to gmail account through SES, sometimes I'll receive an Open click event immediately, when I know the email hasn't been opened. That is a very bad thing because we have to have precise metrics.

I've read some things about google image proxying, don't know if it has something to do with that, there was nothing conclusive.

The open tracking object comes with this data: ipAddress: 66.249.89.16 userAgent: Mozilla/5.0 (Windows NT 10.0; Win64; x64) AppleWebKit/537.36 (KHTML, like Gecko) Chrome/42.0.2311.135 Safari/537.36 Edge/12.246 Mozilla/5.0 timestamp: 2019-07-09T19:14:31.494Z

Any ideas why this is happening?

Answer 1

I've noticed these as well. Before I even received a delivered report. Seems like google is loading the tracker pixel on a server somewhere before even delivering it to the recipient inbox. I'm filtering out these events by useragent. This blog post does a great job explaining: https://www.gmass.co/blog/false-opens-in-gmail/ It will help when you have to tell clients that their open rates have been inflated.