Email Link Verification causes unsubscribe action on URL

[helge99]

We are a provider that sends newsletters to subscribed customers. We have an unsubscribe Link in the our emails so that customers can easily unsubscribe by just clicking on the link.

We have noticed that IP Address registered by Paol Alto Networks test email links by calling the URL in a sandbox. The call of the URL causes the customer to be unsubscribed - without him having clicked the link.

Is there a way to avoid this behavior from paloalto products? Any kind of whitelisting? Anything we can add to link link to prevent the sandbox to click? Anything we can use to identify that this is just a test?

Our solution right now is to aks for an additional user confirmation, but we would like to know if we can do anything else.

Many thanks for any kind of advise.

Helge

[reaper]

you may want to pick this up with support. It could be necessary to add this into the backend logic to identify unsubscribe links and execute differently on them

[BPry · Accepted solution]

@helge99,

This is why most providers require some form of additional input to actually unsubscribe a user. It sounds like you have added a list-unsubscribe link directly into the message instead of the header, which should be avoided.