Ensuring successful email deliverability and tracking behaviour

This article explains methods for ensuring your user tracking behaviour results are accurate and your campaign emails reach your targets successfully without being blocked.

Why are some phishing campaign emails falsely indicating 'Clicked'?

Phishing campaign emails may sometimes show a false "clicked" status due to the way certain security systems handle these emails. This can happen due to the following:

• Email scanners or security tools: Many email servers and third-party tools automatically scan links and attachments in emails to ensure they're safe. These scans can unintentionally mimic a user's action, causing the system to record a "click" even though no one actually interacted with the email.
• Email deliverability issues: If BullPhish ID’s IP addresses or domains haven’t been whitelisted in your email system or firewall, emails may not be delivered correctly. In some cases, partial delivery or interference by these systems can lead to inaccurate reporting.
• Firewall or third-party restrictions: Some firewalls or security policies might block or modify how phishing emails behave, interfering with the tracking mechanisms and potentially causing false reporting.

Methods for ensuring successful email delivery and tracking behaviour

Graphus integration

One option to ensure successful email delivery and tracking behaviour is to integrate BullPhish ID with Graphus. Graphus integration eliminates the need for whitelisting and ensures 100% campaign deliverability to your end users. The Graphus API gives BullPhish ID the ability to place phishing and training emails directly into end user inboxes as opposed to sending them through the internet, saving you hours of whitelisting time. For the integration to work, all of your targets must be protected by Graphus. Refer to the article BullPhish ID integration with Graphus.

Safelisting

If Graphus is not set up for your clients, safelisting the IP addresses and domains of BullPhish ID is crucial. Proper safelisting guarantees that training invites and phishing simulation emails reach their intended recipients without being blocked or filtered out.

To ensure successful email delivery, it is essential that your clients are properly configured and that any firewalls or third-party services are set up to allow these communications. This involves whitelisting the relevant IP addresses and domains to prevent them from being flagged as spam or being otherwise obstructed. As an administrator, it’s important to verify that these settings are in place and to coordinate with third-party support teams if necessary to maintain unobstructed email flow. This proactive approach ensures that your campaign emails are effectively delivered and received.

Your email delivery platform must be configured correctly to ensure your campaign emails are delivered to your intended recipients. Safelisting guides are available for numerous email platforms.

For instance, for Microsoft Outlook users, you must follow the Microsoft Office 365 safelisting guide . To prevent email content from being blocked, you need to add the BullPhish ID sending domains to the Safe Sender list in Outlook for each of your end users.

If you want the BullPhish ID sending domains to be added to each user's Safe Senders list in Outlook automatically, refer to the article Microsoft Office 365: Automatically adding safe senders to Microsoft Outlook.

Microsoft environments using a SMTP relay service

Organizations using Microsoft Exchange for email communications that include a SMTP relay service in the process may experience email delivery issues. In this process, a message relayed via SMTP service arrives in Microsoft Exchange with a source IP address that is different from the sender's IP address. This could cause Microsoft Exchange and any anti-phishing services enabled in the environment to see the email as a possible threat and block delivery.

Microsoft environments using a SMTP relay service should configure a connector with Enhanced Filtering for Exchange Online. The connector will authorize the SMTP relay service to send the original sender's IP address and the original email content to your Microsoft Exchange service where it can properly verify authorization.

For information, see the article Enabling a connector to resolve SMTP relay service email issues in Microsoft Exchange .

Revision	Date
Original release	2/18/25