This article is more than 1 year old

Yahoo! halts! email! forwarding! to! outside! email! addresses!

It looks like lock-in, swims like lock-in and quacks like lock-in … this could be lock-in!

Yahoo! has “temporarily disabled” the ability to forward email from its messaging services.

As the Plunging Palace's support page helpfully explains, “Automatic forwarding sends a copy of incoming messages from one account to another.”

That page goes on to say the 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.”

All of which has folks asking questions about why Yahoo! decided now is the time to do some work on forwarding, given its recent admission it managed to lose 500 million sets of credentials and may have provided bulk email snooping for the United States National Security Agency.

What's that you say? If a company leaked like a sieve and secretly helped spooks, users might be inclined to take their business elsewhere? But for the sake of convenience those folks abandoning the sinking ship might set up their old Yahoo! account so it forwards mail to their new inboxes?

That would be clever. And so would a measure like that described above that made sinking-ship-jumping rather less convenient.

The AP theorises the sudden spurt of development is a deliberate attempt at slowing migration away from Yahoo!. And well Yahoo! might seek to keep users, given rumours Verizon considers it damaged goods and wants its acquisition to proceed at a discount. ®

More about

More about

More about

TIP US OFF

Send us news


Other stories you might like