Thoughts on skipping open/click tracking for anti-virus/spam filters

[Khuthaily]

I wonder if

if (in_array(request()->userAgent(), [
        'Mozilla/5.0',
        'Mozilla/5.0 (Windows NT 10.0; Win64; x64) AppleWebKit/537.36 (KHTML, like Gecko) Chrome/42.0.2311.135 Safari/537.36 Edge/12.246 Mozilla/5.0'
    ]) {
        $event->skip = true;
}

is the right approach to skip open/click tracking for anti-virus/spam filters. Some user agents could belong to legitimate users, leading to incorrect skips or counts. Also, this approach may miss a significant number of bots or email clients that perform automated actions.

I was wondering if we could experiment with:

$botPatterns = [
    '/bot/i',
    '/crawl/i',
    '/spider/i',
    '/fetch/i',
    '/monitor/i',
    '/scanner/i',
    '/slurp/i',
    '/curl/i',
    '/wget/i',
    '/headless/i',
    // other?
];

$userAgent = request()->userAgent();

if (empty($userAgent)) {
    $event->skip = true;
} else {
    foreach ($botPatterns as $pattern) {
        if (preg_match($pattern, $userAgent)) {
            // Log::info('Bot detected', ['pattern' => $pattern, 'userAgent' => $userAgent]);
            $event->skip = true;
            break;
        }
    }
}

I am planning to experiment with this; however, I am open for feedback, suggestions, and recommendations.