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We have created an application to send out bulk emails using AWS SES. We are able to send out the emails and track the metrics like Opens, Clicks etc using AWS SNS successfully. The only problem we have is that in the "Opens" object that SNS is sending, it is always returning the same value "Mozilla/5.0 (Windows NT 5.1; rv:11.0) Gecko Firefox/11.0 (via ggpht.com GoogleImageProxy)". What we are looking at is to determine where the email is opened like Mobile/Tab/Desktop and in which browser. Even when the email is opened in Chrome, it is returning as Mozilla. Any help/suggestion in this regard is highly appreciated.

Additional Info: I figured out that the userAgent is being correctly returned in "clicks" object. But not in the "Open" object. Not sure why. We would like to track the same information when the email is opened also as not all the recipients click on a link.

Vishnuvardhan T
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There isn't actually a way to determine that a message has been opened.¹ Detecting "opens" relies on detection of the viewer fetching an image embedded in the message when the mail is "opened."

At the bottom of each message, we insert a 1 pixel by 1 pixel transparent GIF image. Each email includes a unique link to this image file; when the image is opened, we can tell exactly which message was opened and by whom. When the viewer is Gmail, the user's browser doesn't fetch this image.

https://aws.amazon.com/blogs/messaging-and-targeting/open-and-click-tracking-have-arrived/

When a message is opened in gmail, the user's browser doesn't fetch the image directly, it fetches it from the google image proxy, and the image proxy fetches it from SES and generates the tracking event. Hence, (via ggpht.com GoogleImageProxy).

This isn't something that you have control over, as the sender.

The proxy can identify itself by saying whatever it likes in the User-Agent field -- there is no reason to believe that the entire user-agent string isn't being created by the proxy. Google searching the topic seems to confirm that this is how the proxy always appears. Mozilla/5.0 is a generic user agent string, that does not mean anything more than "I am some kind of web browser, or want the server to believe that I am."

¹there isn't actually a way... well, technically, there is, but thanks to the widespread profusion of spam, this standard is almost never applied to Internet mail. As noted in RFC-8098, "The presence of a Disposition-Notification-To header field in a message is merely a request for an MDN. The recipients' user agents are always free to silently ignore such a request." This is almost always what happens... nothing.

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