After reports of a major hack at Yahoo which compromised details of more than 500 million users and scanning incoming emails of all users for the government, it’s likely that many of its users now want to ditch Yahoo Mail for another service but the company is not going to make that easy for them. In a very odd move, Yahoo has decided to disable email forwarding in Yahoo Mail.
The Associated Press finds that Yahoo disabled the email forwarding feature in the beginning of this month. The change does not impact those who already have forward set up but those who are trying to configure it now.
Yahoo has updated its help site to say that it has “temporarily disabled” mail forwarding for new forwarding addresses as this feature is “currently under development.” It boggles the mind what Yahoo could be trying to do to a feature that has been available on every other email provider for more than a decade now.
It’s a simple feature which just sends a copy of incoming messages from one account to another. Yahoo Mail has had this feature for years and it has worked without any problems. The AP mentions in its report that the timing of this move is very suspicious.
Yahoo is yet to provide its side of the story and until it does, people are likely going to see this move as an attempt by the company to make it harder for people to ditch Yahoo Mail.
Update: A Yahoo spokesperson has reached out with the following statement:
“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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