How to stop Outlook.com from the following email links?

Question

As part of registering an account, I send an email to a new user with a one-time confirmation link that confirms their email address and automatically signs them. However, I noticed that the script check is triggered when the email is opened - before clicking the link. My assumption is that my email client (Outlook.com in this case) has a kind of crawler that monitors the link in the letter when it opens.

Assuming I'm right (and if not, please correct me) and leaving aside what is potentially a serious violation of privacy (since this is off topic here), can I do something to stop this from happening?

To make sure that Outlook.com actually was, I checked the User Agent, which is Mozilla/5.0 (compatible; MSIE 10.0; Windows NT 6.2; WOW64; Trident/6.0 (I use Chrome on Mac) and the remote address, which is 132.245.26.156 (owned by Microsoft).

Answer 1

You can add some restrictions to your .htacess file.

If you want to block 132.245.26.156 to find out your page www.test.com/index.php?verify=registration

You can create this rule:

 RewriteEngine On RewriteCond %{REMOTE_ADDR} ^132\.245\.26\.156 RewriteCond %{QUERY_STRING} verify=registration [NC] RewriteRule ^(.*)$ index.php [F,L]