Why did the link in your email open a warning page?
By Matthew Eagle
Founder, Eagle AI Agency. Eight years as a staffing account executive.
Published . Updated .
We approved an email with a clean payment link. Our customer clicked it and landed on a warning page instead.
A link in your email opens a warning or redirect page when something between you and your customer rewrites it, usually click tracking in your email tool or a connected app that changes links as it writes the message. Checking the draft will not catch it, because the change happens after the draft. The only proof is the copy that actually landed, so send a test to yourself and read the address the link really points to.
We found this out last week, on a payment link.
What happened with our payment link?
An email to a customer carrying a payment link was approved, checked and sent. The link in the draft was clean. It loaded, it pointed straight at the payment page, and it passed the link check we run on every outgoing message.
The customer clicked it and landed on a page telling them they were being redirected, asking whether they wanted to continue. On a payment, that looks exactly like the thing people are trained not to trust.
Matthew sent the customer the clean link himself, pasted by hand. Then we went looking for the cause.
Why didn't checking the draft catch it?
Checking the draft did not catch it because the draft was never the problem. The connected app that sent the message rewrote every link at the moment it wrote the email, after our check had already passed.
We proved it by reading the raw message as it was actually written, not the version on screen. Every web address in it had been swapped for a redirect, in the plain text and behind the clickable link alike.
Two controls settled it. A link pasted by hand into the same mailbox went out untouched. Mail coming in read back clean. So the mailbox was fine, and the app sitting on top of it was doing the rewriting.
Where else can a link get changed after you approve it?
A link can get changed anywhere a tool sits between your draft and the inbox. Once we knew to look, we found it in more than one place.
Where a link can get changed after you approve it
| Where it happens | What your customer sees | How to catch it |
|---|---|---|
| A connected app rewrites links as it writes the message | A redirect or warning page before the real one | Read a copy that landed in a real inbox, not the draft |
| Click tracking in an email or CRM tool | Usually nothing visible, but the link points to a tracking address that bounces them on. In the plain-text version, the tracking address is what they see | Turn click tracking off, then check a received copy |
| Open tracking | No link change, but a hidden image is added to every email | Turn it off in the same settings |
| One campaign with its own settings | One campaign quietly behaves differently from the rest | Check every campaign, not just the first one |
| Copying a link out of a sent email to reuse it | You send a link that was already wrapped | Always take the link from its source page |
The second row surprised us most. One of our own sending tools was wrapping every link in click tracking. In the formatted email the visible text looked perfect, and the address underneath was the tracker. Click tracking is a redirect by definition. That is how it counts the click.
On another tool, every campaign we checked had tracking off except one, which had both trackers on. Nobody had noticed until we checked them one by one.
What did we change?
We changed the checks so they look at what was sent, not just what was written, and we took links out of the emails where we could not guarantee them.
- The rewriting app can no longer send a link. A guard now refuses any message through it that contains a web address.
- The draft check got stricter. It used to fail only on broken links. It now also fails on tracking wrappers and on any link that sends you to a different site.
- A sent check compares the real message against the approved draft. Any link that changed, appeared or went missing fails it.
- Campaign tracking settings get read on a schedule, and any campaign with tracking on gets flagged.
- Emails sent on Matthew's behalf now carry no links at all. If a message needs one, he pastes it and sends it himself. A link he types into his own mail goes out exactly as written.
How do you check your own emails for redirect links?
You check by sending a real email through the exact tool you use with customers, to an inbox you can read, and looking at where the link actually goes.
How to check your emails for redirect links
- 1Send a test with a link through each tool that emails your customers: your CRM, your invoicing, your booking system, any assistant or app connected to your mailbox.
- 2Open the copy that arrived. Hover over the link on a computer, or press and hold it on a phone, and read the full address.
- 3If it is not the exact address you pasted, something rewrote it. Find the click tracking setting and switch it off for anything customer-facing.
- 4Switch off open tracking while you are in there. It adds a hidden image to every message.
- 5Never reuse a link copied out of a sent email. Go back to the payment page, booking page or document and copy it fresh.
- 6Run the test again whenever you add a tool or start a new campaign. Each one comes with its own settings.
If you are a small team, payment and booking links matter most. Those are the moments a customer is deciding whether to trust you.
This is part of how we set up email for clients, covered on the email marketing page. The wider lesson, that a check which passes is not proof the job got done, is the same one behind what breaks when you automate a process nobody is watching.
Questions people ask
Is click tracking always a bad idea?
Not always, but it always adds a hop between your customer and the page. For payment links, booking links and anything where trust matters, we turn it off.
Why does the email look fine when I open it myself?
Because the visible text is usually left alone. Only the address underneath changes. Hover or press and hold the link to see where it really goes.
Will a link checker catch a redirect?
Only if it runs on the message that was actually sent. Ours ran on the draft, which was clean. The rewrite happened afterwards.
What should I do if a customer already got a wrapped link?
Send them the clean link from your normal mailbox, copied straight from the source page, and fix the tool before the next send. That is what we did.
If you want your customer emails set up so every link goes out exactly as you wrote it, book a call.
More notes
- What stops AI outreach from sending the wrong message?This week a prospect received our AI's private note about them as the opening message of a sequence. Here is how it got through, how we made sure it was the only one, and what checks the words now.
- Why do verified emails still bounce?This week a list that passed two separate email checks still bounced hard enough to stop its own campaign. Here is what the checks missed, and what we now run before every send.
- How do you move to a new CRM without losing your history?We moved a small firm's years of CRM history into a new system and checked every record. The next day they told us the notes had not come over. They had.
- Can you use AI on work that is under an NDA?A confidentiality agreement that never says the word AI can still rule out the tools you were about to use.
- Is your outreach broken, or is the benchmark wrong?The fastest way to wreck a campaign that is working is to measure it against a number that came from somewhere else.
- Do more pages actually help your website rank?The advice to publish more assumes pages are the unit of measurement. They are not, and a site full of near identical pages can be worth less than a site with a handful of good ones.
- How do you check if your cold email is going to spam?We spent days proving our email was landing in spam. Every test was pointed at a kind of mailbox almost nobody on the list used.
- Should a staffing firm hire a recruiter or rent a desk?Most small staffing firms are not short of a recruiter. They are short of a recruiter they can afford to carry while one ramps.
- Why does AI make things up, and how do you stop it?A model handed something unusable does not stop. It produces something plausible, and it will produce a different plausible thing the next time you ask.
- What breaks when you automate a process nobody is watching?Automation rarely fails loudly. It fails quietly, and keeps reporting that it is fine.
- Why did your cold outreach run out of leads?Usually it is not the message. You have simply run out of people to send it to.
- Do you need to hire a salesperson, or a system?The honest answer depends on one thing, and it is not budget.
- What do you do about sales when you are already at full capacity?The trap is not that you are too busy. It is that being busy feels like being safe.
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