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It seems that Outlook.com uses the BingPreview crawler to crawl links in emails.

But the one-time links are marked as used/expired after opening the email and before the user gets the chance to use them.

I try to add a rel="nofollow" in the <a> but without success.

How can I block the crawler for each links in email ?

Thanks

colas
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4 Answers4

8

I did the same. 

$user_agent = isset($_SERVER['HTTP_USER_AGENT']) ? $_SERVER['HTTP_USER_AGENT'] : '';
        // Deny access for the BingPreview bot, used by outlook.com on links in e-mails ad Slackbot
        if (strpos($user_agent, 'BingPreview') !== false || strpos($user_agent, 'Slackbot') !== false) {
            header('Status: 403 Forbiden', true, 403);
            exit(1);
        }
colas
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1

I've seen the same issue. The links in emails opened in outlook seem to be crawled immediately by the 'BingPreview' bot.

I've added a robots meta tag to the header in the HTML email.

I've also added a check for standard bot signatures appearing in the user-agent header in the link handling script. If it looks like a bot then I'm exiting and not invalidating the link.

Can't say for sure that this is working yet (only just made the changes).

ColinK
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1

I've just experienced the same issue with confirmation links being executed in a sent email before the user has received them and invalidating the link. I got around the issue by modifying the page the URL links to. I've added a Confirm button on the page which the user has to click to confirm their email and this works nicely.

Shawn White
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1

same here. we used a program block to disallow BingPreview and Slackbot and some more to access the links by using server script language (lucee/coldfusion and application.cfc)

Raffael Meier
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