Yahoo disables auto email forwarding feature, making it difficult to switch services

midian182

Posts: 9,658   +121
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Considering everything that’s been going on at Yahoo over the last few months – admitting that 500 million accounts were breached in 2014, scanning user emails for US spy agencies – it’s no surprise that some people want to leave. But the company’s going out of its way to make switching to another service provider as difficult as possible.

The Associated Press was the first to report that Yahoo switched off its email forwarding feature at the start of this month, meaning users can’t automatically redirect their incoming emails to another account.

Anyone who set the feature up before October won’t be affected, but those who’ve tried to activate email forwarding recently – and there’s likely to be quite a few – have found Yahoo has disabled it. The company says the feature is “under development” as they work to improve it, which, considering it’s a basic concept offered by virtually all major email providers, sounds pretty suspicious.

Additionally, TechCrunch notes that customers of British Telecom, which uses Yahoo for its email services, found they couldn’t use the email forwarding feature or even delete their accounts. Anyone who tried was met with the message: “Sorry the delete feature is currently unavailable. This feature will become available by the end of September."

One workaround for the restriction is to switch on the vacation autoresponse message on your Yahoo account and include the new email address in the text.

Yahoo said it was working on getting email forwarding back up as soon as possible.

We’re working to get auto-forward back up and running as soon as possible because we know how useful it can be to our users. The feature was temporary disabled as part of previously planned maintenance to improve its functionality between a user’s various accounts. Users can expect an update to the auto-forward functionality soon. In the meantime, we continue to support multiple account management.

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If I had known this was a feature at all I would have stopped using the account half a decade ago. Ive been slowly moving accounts over to gmail and hopefully can delete my yahoo ones by the end of the year at least...
 
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