Does email link tracking recognise auto link downloading

[NMolloy]

Hi

When sending an email containing a link to a hubspot hosted PDF, some recipient email systems auto download the linked file to check for viruses and stores the document. A typical system is Microsoft 365 ATP Safe Links and Safe Attachments as part of the full E5 suite.

Does anyone know if Hubspot tracks and allocates this download activity as actual email link clicks or not?

Thanks,

Nick

[JenWeiss]

Hi @NMolloy, 

Thank you for reaching out to us! 

To start, when you send an email through HubSpot, each email sent contains a unique tracking code which ties the email thread to a specific HubSpot contact. Because of this tracking code, our system will register an "open" whenever the email is opened. Here is a HubSpot Knowledge Base article that talks a bit more about this just incase.

Depending on the mail client, there are security filters that can trigger our opens. For instance, if a system has strict security filters set up, their system will crawl emails before they are actually placed into an inbox. This crawling can at times trigger our tracking image to load, counting an open and click.

One of our HubSpot employees in the Product team wrote this community post regarding how this "bot activity" can affect marketing emails which you may want to take a look!

Best,

@JenWeiss