Yahoo 'Temporarily' Disables Auto Email Forwarding

Thinking of ditching Yahoo for another email provider? Think again. According to the Associated Press, Yahoo disabled automatic email forwarding at the beginning of the month.

Like postal mail forwarding, the electronic version automatically sends a copy of incoming messages from one account (Yahoo) to another (Gmail). Users who previously set up the function are unaffected. Those folks, however, trying to cut ties after Yahoo's massive data breach are having a tough time.

"The feature was [temporarily] disabled as part of previously planned maintenance to improve its functionality between a user's various accounts," a Yahoo spokeswoman told PCMag. "Users can expect an update to the auto-forward functionality soon.

"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," she continued.

But the timing of these renovations, as the AP points out, is "extremely suspicious."

Yahoo in September confirmed that data associated with at least 500 million users accounts was stolen in a 2014 breach of its network by a "state-sponsored actor." Names, email addresses, telephone numbers, dates of birth, hashed passwords, and possibly encrypted or unencrypted security questions and answers were stolen.

A report last week, meanwhile, claimed that Yahoo has scanned customers' incoming emails at the request of US intelligence officials. According to Reuters, the company built a custom software program to search users' messages for specific information. Yahoo pushed back, saying the story "is misleading" and that "the mail scanning described in the article does not exist on our systems."

:story: PC Magazine