Yahoo Mail disabled forwarding, good luck switching now (update)
'This feature is under development.'
The Yahoo email hack and government surveillance claims aren't going to go away no matter how much CEO Marissa Mayer wants them to. For users trying to flee the service, the beleaguered internet company is making it rather difficult. That's because since the beginning of the month, the company has disabled email forwarding according to The Associated Press. From the sounds of it, though, it's just for folks who've recently tried the feature, not people who've had it set up prior.
From Yahoo's help site:
"Automatic forwarding sends a copy of incoming messages from one account to another.
This feature is currently 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."
Below it is an option to indicate whether or not the help note was indeed helpful. Something tells me there will be an awful lot of "no" votes on this.
AP's sources say that the timing is pretty suspicious and that email forwarding has been a "basic concept for 15 years for just about every email provider out there." What's more, TechCrunch reports that British Telecoms customers (BT uses Yahoo for email) haven't been able to setup email forwarding or even delete their accounts. The error message there? "Sorry, the delete feature is currently unavailable. This feature will become available by the end of September," according to The Register. So, September 2017?
We've reached out to Yahoo for more information and will update this post should the company respond.
Update: A Yahoo spokesperson has sent us 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."
