Dreadful behavior from Yahoo

In their bid to recapture momentum from Google, the Yahooligans are behaving very, very badly.

On Monday morning, I received an automated e-mail from Alexander Falk, founder of Altova, saying that he was changing his e-mail address:

I have a brand-spanking-new Yahoo! Mail address.

Hello, I have switched my e-mail address from email hidden; JavaScript is required to email hidden; JavaScript is required. Please be sure to update your address book and send messages to my new Yahoo! Mail address from now on.

Thank You!
email hidden; JavaScript is required

Interested too? Go check out Yahoo! Mail

I did what you probably would have done: Added the yahoo.com address to Alexander’s listing in my address book and deleted the gmail address.

However, I received a follow-up message a few hours later with the subject line, “Please disregard FAKE e-mail switched from GMail to Yahoo notice!” Alexander wrote:

Dear friends:

I am mortified! I don’t know what to say!! I’ve been “had” by a rather evil marketing ploy from Yahoo and you had to suffer as a result of that…

I am very sorry about the confusion and about the FALSE new e-mail address announcement that was sent out by Yahoo Mail Beta this morning claiming to be on my behalf. I was in the process of testing the new Yahoo Mail Beta service and imported my GMail address book using the “Import contacts…” function – and without any prompt or warning the Yahoo system suddenly decided to SPAM all 1,500 of my contacts with a message claiming that I had “switched” from GMail to Yahoo Mail.

That’s incredibly unprofessional of Yahoo, and makes me totally uninterested in testing their Yahoo Mail service – or any of their other services.

Alexander also blogged about this, see his post.