Yahoo! has reportedly disabled automatic email forwarding — a feature that lets the users to forward a copy of incoming emails from Yahoo! Mail to another email account.
Past few weeks are not good for the company’s email services as there are lot of bad news. In September, the company admitted a massive 2014 data breach that leaked over 500 million Yahoo! users details.
If this wasn’t enough for Yahoo! users to leave the service, another shocking news came just last week that the company scanned emails of hundreds of millions of its users at the request of a U.S. intelligence service last year.
This revelation put the final nail in the coffin of Yahoo! Mail service and convinced the decades old loyal users to switch for other rival alternatives, like Google’s Gmail, or Microsoft’s Outlook.
But it looks like Yahoo! has decided to hinder the smooth transition. The company has disabled Yahoo! Mail’s automatic email forwarding service that would allow users to automatically redirect incoming emails from their Yahoo! account to another account with another service, from the beginning of October.
The company claims the feature is “under development” and they are not intended to do so intentionally. But there is something fishy. Why all of a sudden it’s under development? Following is a statement issued by the company on its help page related to feature status:
“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. If you’ve already enabled Mail Forwarding in the past, your email will continue to forward to the address you previously configured.”
In other words, only those user who already have the feature turned ON in the past, won’t face any trouble to leave, but those users who are trying to turn ON automatic email forwarding now have no option except to wait when it is available again.
Yahoo has shared the following statement about the recent move:
“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.”
A try to save Verizon Acquisition deal?
Yahoo! is on continuous down grade since a couple of years. It was acquired by the Verizon for $4.5 billion last month but the deal is not closed yet.
The move to turn off the email forwarding option can be an attempt to keep its customers’ accounts active to save the crucial deal with Verizon Communications.
Workaround?
As a workaround to Yahoo! latest move, you could switch ON your vacation responder instead to automatically reply to emails with a note about the change of your email account and your new email address.
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