MailRUBot is a bot in the link preview bots category, operated by Mail Russia.
The mail.ru bot is a mail fetcher on behalf of the Mail.ru email service.
Link preview bots fetch a page when someone shares its URL in a chat app or social network, to build the preview card. Blocking them breaks your link previews, so keep them allowed but leave them out of analytics and ad requests.
MailRUBot identifies itself with this user agent string:
Mozilla/5.0 (compatible; Linux x86_64; Mail.RU_Bot/2.0; +http://go.mail.ru/help/robots)Anyone can copy a user agent string. Transfon Security also checks where each request comes from, so a request that claims to be a known crawler but comes from the wrong network is treated as a fake, not as the real crawler.
MailRUBot follows robots.txt, so these rules stop it crawling the paths you choose. robots.txt is a plain text file at the root of your domain, such as https://example.com/robots.txt.
User-agent: Mail.RU_Bot Disallow: /
User-agent: Mail.RU_Bot Disallow: /private/ Disallow: /search
User-agent: Mail.RU_Bot Allow: /blog/ Disallow: /
User-agent: Mail.RU_Bot Allow: / User-agent: * Disallow: /
User-agent: Mail.RU_Bot group, MailRUBot ignores your User-agent: * rules, so repeat any that should still apply.Mail.RU_Bot from MailRUBot's user agent; check Mail Russia's own documentation if it publishes a different robots.txt name.Treat robots.txt as a statement of your policy, and enforce it where requests arrive.
MailRUBot fetches pages when your links are shared or syndicated. Keep it allowed so previews and feeds work, but leave it out of page views and ad requests.
Transfon Security for publishersWhen ads or posts are shared, MailRUBot fetches the landing page. Those hits are not clicks, so keep them out of campaign reports.
Transfon Security for advertisersProduct links shared in chats and feeds are fetched by MailRUBot. Keep it allowed so previews show the right image and price.
Transfon Security for e-commerceAllow MailRUBot on public pages so shared links preview well, and keep it off the app.
Transfon Security for SaaS and APIsrobots.txt is a request, not an enforcement. Transfon Security shows MailRUBot by name in the Top Bots report, so you can see how often it visits and which pages it reads. Block or allow it with a User Agent rule, or slow it down with a rate limit decision rule.
Transfon Security
MailRUBot is a bot in the link preview bots category, operated by Mail Russia. The mail.ru bot is a mail fetcher on behalf of the Mail.ru email service.
Yes. MailRUBot follows robots.txt, so a Disallow rule for the Mail.RU_Bot user agent stops it from crawling the paths you list.
Add "User-agent: Mail.RU_Bot" followed by "Disallow: /" to the robots.txt file at the root of your site. To enforce it, block requests whose user agent contains "Mail.RU_Bot" at your WAF. In Transfon Security that is one User Agent block rule.
No. robots.txt is voluntary, so MailRUBot may not follow it, and anyone can send MailRUBot's user agent, so a fake MailRUBot ignores your rule. Enforce the rule where requests arrive, at your WAF, and check the source network.
Link preview bots fetch a page when someone shares its URL in a chat app or social network, to build the preview card. Blocking them breaks your link previews, so keep them allowed but leave them out of analytics and ad requests.
Transfon Security identifies every bot in this directory in your traffic reports, flags fake search crawlers, and lets you allow, block or rate limit each bot.
Privacy, security, monetization, and performance insights. A few emails a month, no spam.