We just sent an email blast to our customers. One of our customers called us to let us know that he was reading our email, using his mouse to read along, and when he hovered over a term for one of our product lines, an ad appeared (over the text) for a different company selling this type of product.
The customer uses Yahoo and/or has the Yahoo toolbar.
I’ve never heard of ads appearing from within a private email. Is this legal? We don’t want contextual links in our private email.
What exactly is this?? And how can it be disabled? I’d like to learn more about this…
Since he has the Yahoo toolbar installed on his PC or is reading the email in Yahoo’s interface, he will receive those ads. That is perfectly normal. As for disabling it, only the client can do that on their side.
As for using a service like Infolinks within an email, that will not work, since most of those services use javascript or external PHP code, which will be disabled on 99% of email clients in the former case and inaccessible in the second case.
It can only happen when you are using a web mail interface to read the emails and you have the web interface set to insert the ads into the emails you receive.
It is not possible to insert ads like that into the emails themselves so that everyone will see them - they can only be added by the web service that is being used to display the email.