- Jan 24, 2011
- 9,378
Yahoo has disabled "automatic email forwarding," a feature that lets users forward emails they receive in their Yahoo inboxes to external email providers.
According to several users who spoke to the Associated Press, the feature has been disabled since the start of the month, after news of Yahoo deploying an email scanning system at the request of the US government.
Previously Yahoo acknowledged to a massive data breach that exposed the personal details of over 500 million users.
Disabling email forwarding makes leaving Yahoo Mail much harder
With so much bad press, the company may be trying to limit the damage to its userbase by making it harder for users and businesses to migrate to other services.
Users activate email forwarding as a way to funnel emails from different accounts to one central email address. They also deploy email forwarding when migrating to a new provider, automatically redirecting emails until all their contacts update their address books.
Closing down a Yahoo email may be easy, but that leaves a lot of conversations dead in the water. Users generally deploy email forwarding on an account for a few months before closing it down.
Yahoo: Email forwarding is "under development"
In a statement, Yahoo said that old email forwarding settings will continue to work and only the creation of new email forwarding routes has been disabled.
The timing of this "maintenance" operation leaves users with no smooth way of migrating their email service to another provider.
“ 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. ”
Read more: http://news.softpedia.com/news/yaho...ng-to-prevent-users-from-leaving-509170.shtml
According to several users who spoke to the Associated Press, the feature has been disabled since the start of the month, after news of Yahoo deploying an email scanning system at the request of the US government.
Previously Yahoo acknowledged to a massive data breach that exposed the personal details of over 500 million users.
Disabling email forwarding makes leaving Yahoo Mail much harder
With so much bad press, the company may be trying to limit the damage to its userbase by making it harder for users and businesses to migrate to other services.
Users activate email forwarding as a way to funnel emails from different accounts to one central email address. They also deploy email forwarding when migrating to a new provider, automatically redirecting emails until all their contacts update their address books.
Closing down a Yahoo email may be easy, but that leaves a lot of conversations dead in the water. Users generally deploy email forwarding on an account for a few months before closing it down.
Yahoo: Email forwarding is "under development"
In a statement, Yahoo said that old email forwarding settings will continue to work and only the creation of new email forwarding routes has been disabled.
The timing of this "maintenance" operation leaves users with no smooth way of migrating their email service to another provider.
“ 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. ”
Read more: http://news.softpedia.com/news/yaho...ng-to-prevent-users-from-leaving-509170.shtml
