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posted by martyb on Wednesday October 12 2016, @12:09PM   Printer-friendly
from the how-ever-did-THAT-happen? dept.

We had two Soylentils write in to tell us this news.

Yahoo! Disables Automatic Email Forwarding

Yahoo! disabled automatic email forwarding around the beginning of the month:

As Yahoo's embattled email service suffers through a slew of bad news, some users are finding it hard to leave. Automatic email forwarding was disabled at the beginning of the month, several users told The Associated Press. While those who've set up forwarding in the past are unaffected, some who want to leave over recent hacking and surveillance revelations are struggling to switch to rival services. "This is all extremely suspicious timing," said Jason Danner, who runs an information technology business in Auckland, New Zealand, and is trying to quit Yahoo after 18 years with the email provider.

Yahoo Inc. declined to comment on the recent change beyond pointing to a three-line notice on Yahoo's help site which says that that the company temporarily disabled the feature "while we work to improve it."

Also at BBC, PC World, and TechCrunch.

Previously: 500 Million Yahoo Accounts Hacked
Yahoo "Secretly Scanned Emails for US Authorities"

Amid Fallout from Hack and Spying, Yahoo! Disables Email Forwarding

After back-to-back revelations that hackers had compromised a staggering 500 million Yahoo Mail accounts and that the company had complied with a US government request to open incoming emails for surveillance, some users are having a hard time switching to any of Yahoo's competitors.

While it remains unclear how many users intend to leave over the privacy concerns and bad publicity, several told the Associated Press that their ability to do so has been hampered since the beginning of the month, when Yahoo disabled its automated email-forwarding option.

Those who had already set up their forwarding are unaffected, but those who wish to begin forwarding messages now are unable.

This ought to give pause to users who might one day want to get their data out of Facebook, too.


Original Submission #1Original Submission #2

 
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  • (Score: 0) by Anonymous Coward on Wednesday October 12 2016, @12:30PM

    by Anonymous Coward on Wednesday October 12 2016, @12:30PM (#413404)

    That very step will cause more people to be eager to leave, and forwarding is not the only way to get your mails to another account. Most mail providers offer automatic fetching from other mail accounts. And if Yahoo blocks that, people will just copy the mail using external programs that act as mail clients to Yahoo. And if Yahoo disables that (assuming at that point there are still customers left), people will find a way to automatically scrap their mails from the web interface.

  • (Score: 2) by dyingtolive on Wednesday October 12 2016, @12:36PM

    by dyingtolive (952) on Wednesday October 12 2016, @12:36PM (#413405)

    Yeah. I forward anything not marked for deletion to my private email address from my gmail one. It's effectively an overglorified spam blocker for me, and an easy way for people to get stuff to a recognizable email that's easy to convey (i.e. there's no reasonable person on earth I'd have to talk to that you would have to spell out "gmail" for) over the phone. If they did something like this, gmail would serve literally zero purpose for me.

    --
    Don't blame me, I voted for moose wang!
  • (Score: 0) by Anonymous Coward on Wednesday October 12 2016, @10:18PM

    by Anonymous Coward on Wednesday October 12 2016, @10:18PM (#413670)

    There was a web-scraping script called fetchyahoo, I don't know whether it still works.