Yahoo disabled automatic email forwarding at the beginning of the month, the Associated Press reported, citing several users.
Users would normally be able to create copies of their incoming messages using automatic forwarding, which would be sent to other accounts such as Hotmail or Gmail. However users began complaining at the beginning of the month that this feature had been blocked.
Yahoo said in the post: “This feature is under development. While we work to improve it, we’ve temporarily disabled the ability to turn on Mail Forwarding for new forwarding addresses.”
Yahoo user Brian McIntosh said forwarding has been “a basic concept for 15 years for just about every email provider out there. All of a sudden it’s under development, and only at Yahoo”, speaking to the Associated Press.
“That all this has ceased to function when they have been getting a lot of press seems extremely dubious to me,” added McIntosh.
In September Yahoo revealed a record-breaking hack of personal information, affecting at least 500 million customers in 2014.
More recently the company was found to have secretly built custom software to scan emails, allowing the US government to conduct surveillance on its users’ emails.
What is certainly true is that this move makes it more difficult to users to move to other email accounts, which is likely happening on a mass scale right now.
Jean G. Thomas
