Member Avatar for Davife

I've created an HTML email which has a link back to my website. It works fine in every mail client that I've tested except Yahoo mail. Yahoo mail adds rel="nofollow" and deletes the href link.

For examplE:

<a style="text-decoration:none;font-size:16px;color:#0000CC;" href="www.xyz.com" target="_blank">Visit Us</a>

is replaced with

<a rel="nofollow" style="text-decoration:none;font-size:16px;color:#0000CC;">Visit Us</a>

Consequently, there's no link in Yahoo mail.

I have not been to find any documentation on how to prevent this from happening. Any inputs would be appreciated.

Thanks.
David

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Good catches by and . Two additional gotchas I see with Yahoo Mail’s sanitizer that can make an anchor lose its href entirely: (1) the URL scheme is missing or malformed, and (2) the scheme has been HTML/percent-encoded. If the protocol itself is encoded (for example, https%3A%2F%2F... inside href), Yahoo will strip the attribute; leaving the protocol unencoded fixes it. You can also reduce surprises by turning off Yahoo’s Link Preview while composing or reading (Settings -> Writing email -> disable link previews). (bennadel.com, yahoomail.tumblr.com, help.yahoo.com)

For reliability, send absolute, parseable URLs and keep the href clean. Here’s a safe pattern I use in email templates:

<a href="https://www.example.com/page?utm_source=newsletter" target="_blank">Visit us</a>

If Yahoo adds rel="nofollow" at display time, that only affects SEO, not whether the link is clickable, so it isn’t a problem for recipients. (en.wikipedia.org)

Re ’s tel: question: Yahoo’s webmail UI does not activate tel: links, so phone numbers often won’t be clickable there. A pragmatic approach is to show the number as text for desktop/webmail and keep a real tel: link for mobile. Example:

<!-- mobile-first: clickable on small screens -->
<a href="tel:+18005551234" style="pointer-events:auto; cursor:auto;">Call +1 800 555 1234</a>
<!-- optionally disable pointer events via CSS for larger screens if your ESP allows -->

This aligns with long-standing client support findings where tel: is reliable on mobile but inconsistent in webmail, including Yahoo. (campaignmonitor.com)

One last sanity check: make sure your domain is authenticated (SPF, DKIM; DMARC if you’re a bulk sender). While auth alone doesn’t control link rewriting, Yahoo tightened sender requirements in 2024, and poor authentication can trigger extra friction and warnings that hurt UX. (blog.postmaster.yahooinc.com, litmus.com)

Recommended Answers

All 10 Replies

Member Avatar for Kraai

Hi David

Yahoo mail client is known for adding the "nofollow" to all incoming links from anyone. If you create an email in yahoo mail client with a link in it, it will also ad the "nofollow" to the link. Yahoo is doing this automatically, and I think the reasoning behind this may be to help combat spam links to count in search engines.

Member Avatar for Davife

The problem is that the link, ie href="www.xyz.com", is removed by Yahoo and consequently the link is unavailable to the recipient. Clearly there is something that Yahoo is looking for because it doesn't always remove the link and I need to know how to prevent Yahoo from removing it.

Any ideas?

Thanks

Member Avatar for Kraai

There are two possibilities. Firstly, it can be a setting on the receiver of the email that is set to something like "do not display active links" or "images" or yahoo may think it is junk mail or spam mail and filtered it not to show links or images.

Member Avatar for TraderDan

I'm having the same problem. It's not a user setting, or even because the message is getting caught in the SPAM folder... it's something else. Unfortunately though, I'm stuck on this. Anyone know the answer?

Member Avatar for Alish735

Thanks to all for sharing this useful information.I have never tried it before but now i will try to do it.

Member Avatar for depleater

The problem is that the value of the href attribute in your link is missing the "http://" protocol-prefix.

So instead of href="www.xyz.com" it should be href="http://www.xyz.com" (or a different prefix like "https://" or "ftp://", etc.)

Yahoo still shouldn't be doing what they're doing (ie. changing the content of an email with absolutely no warning to the user), but at least it's something you can easily fix. :)

Member Avatar for ares.draguna

2 years later, yahoo make an even dumber decission and even if the href has the https protocol it will add the nofollow rel on the <a></a> tags...

Any way to bypass this now??

Member Avatar for vinithktp

any solution for href tel issue in yahoo?

Member Avatar for Orane_1

Hi guys, to conform to the current Yahoo mail standards, ensure you have the target="_blank" to your anchor tags along with absolute URLS with http or https.
Also, I noticed that using tables to display your data is better handled in Yahoo Mail.
Don't worry too much about the rel="nofollow", that shouldn't cause any issues to the recipient.

Member Avatar for Duane_3

Go to settings, writing e-mail, and disable "automatically generate a preview of links". This will solve the problem.

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