Yahoo! Shortcuts are Baaaaaaaack….

Unfortunately it seems that pesky ruminants of Yahoo! Shortcuts are back! For those of you who are not familiar, Yahoo! Shortcuts once imposed random links around key words within your email to various sites across the web. When Yahoo! Beta came out, we thought we could put those days behind us but we might have celebrated a little too soon.

The good news is that the new behavior is not quite as frustrating because they no longer link to random sites that you may or may not want your readers visiting. However from a coding standpoint, it's equally as troublesome.

So what's the "New" behavior?

Now-a-days, Yahoo! seems to target key words or key word combinations - generally within links of your email. It inserts a span within your link with a class of "yshortcuts" - which renders a blue color.  On hover, it renders with a background color and a dotted bottom-border as shown below.

So this:

Might get converted to:

Wheras this:

Might slip under the radar.

So what's the fix?

Add this to your embedded CSS:

Another fix is to add a span tag inside each anchor with an inline style:

But this will not resolve the hover issue.

Other Side Effects

We've also noticed a glitch when Yahoo! Shortcuts comes into contact with street addresses which results in duplication of content. To learn more on that, check out this article: Stop Yahoo from Displaying your Email Twice

Have you noticed anything strange about Yahoo!? If so, feel free to reach out to our customer support or post your comments below.

Cheers all and happy testing!
Michelle (Miki)