Starting on Monday, November 1st, we have seen a massive influx of programmatic click activity on emails. This spans multiple newsletters, multiple sending domains, and multiple receiving domains. This does not appear to be localized to a specific client, or a specific set of mailbox providers.
In some cases, we are seeing upwards of a 10x increase in total clicks reported. This can show up not only in our reporting but also possibly in tools such as google analytics traffic reports on the sites that were linked in the email.
These clicks look to be programmatic - which means they are generated by some type of email evaluation service which appears to be following all of the links in each email that records them as clicks. Programmatic clicks themselves are not unusual, but what is unusual is the massive volume we are seeing. This is not an attack, rather bots in the overall email ecosystem are generating this increase in clicks.