I do some email marketing for a company that sells family-related items, and today we had a serious problem with Yahoo! Mail. We got a few phone calls from upset parents who had clicked on links “in our email” that led them to pages featuring some quite disturbing “mature” (realistically, these should be called “immature,” but I digress…) halloween costumes.

Panicked, I quickly logged back in and double-checked the links we had pasted, and found them all to be in order. What was going on? After a little more searching, we tracked this disastrous occurrence to Yahoo.

Gee, thanks Yahoo!

Turns out, Yahoo automatically tags random things in emails with quick links to advertising partners, searches, maps, etc. SO, when we mentioned “halloween costumes,” Yahoo turned it into a link to objectionable material for some of our recipients. Ouch, especially to a family-type company!

The plot thickens: what happens when you’re doing e-commerce and you email to a potential customer? They click on a “link” that they think you sent, and get sent to a competitor’s website, or some objectionable material, or even to a site speaking poorly against the very product you’re plugging. What do you do? Nothing, you can’t.

…well, ok, there’s one thing you can do. Jesse Kanclerz recommends you send your email to yourself first, find the words Yahoo is auto-linking, and turn them into your own links to somewhere related before Yahoo can get to them. Good idea, Jesse, wish I’d heard of it before today.

This is seriously over the line, Yahoo! Offer some way to disable this feature from a sender’s side, please!