SoylentNews is people
SoylentNews
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.
(Score: 2, Insightful) by Anonymous Coward on Wednesday October 12 2016, @04:00PM
Using a centralized email provider is a very bad idea. You end up 'stuck', whether you like it or not.
Buy yourself a domain name, and host your own email, and you'll never have to worry about your 'provider' (yourself) changing the rules on you. Nor will you ever have to worry about changing your email address ever again.
(Score: 0) by Anonymous Coward on Wednesday October 12 2016, @04:04PM
I've actually been looking into this but I can't find any good resources on setting up a properly working e-mail server that does SMTP (and plays nice with others), IMAP and ideally enables calendar sharing.
I'm not trolling, I'm really looking for something like that.
(Score: 2) by Scruffy Beard 2 on Wednesday October 12 2016, @04:40PM
I currently use a web-host to handle my e-mail for me (and basic web-page).
(Score: 0) by Anonymous Coward on Wednesday October 12 2016, @05:58PM
I thought about running my own server many times, but have never had enough motivation to get it working
I have the domain already, but the server is the issue....a home DSL link normally has SMTP blocked for outgoing Email. Getting an Amazon Free EC would work for 12 months, but then I need to pay for the server to remain going. $25 per year for their nano server isn't that much, but then I need to make sure the server is patched and the SPAM filtering is up-to-date, and a lot of other headaches.
Then I got to worry about retraining the spouse...and I can't blame yahoo when her Email gets hosed. And backups and other stuff.
For a business this obviously makes sense. For me and my wife it is a lot of extra headache and I don't see the gain.
My Email isn't that exciting that I care who is looking at it. I do keep it on yahoo, simply because google has too much other data; but google probably also have my email anyway because I view it on one device using the Android mail....
(Score: 0) by Anonymous Coward on Wednesday October 12 2016, @07:06PM
Linode has a collection of documentation [linode.com] that may be relevant to your interests, particularly postfix/dovecot/mysql [linode.com].
(Score: 2) by termigator on Wednesday October 12 2016, @09:57PM
Which requires some admin knowledge to setup correctly, more now than it used to. Make sure you have your SPF and DKIM configured correctly so you avoid being tagged as a spammer. What about failover? You will need a secondary MX server to queue up email in case primary goes down. et.al.
A couple of decades ago, I found doing such kind of stuff interesting, but now, I have other priorities. I just want shit to work and minimize admin duties. I have been using gmail for years as my central account for all my email identities (except work). With gmail, I can still use my own MUA, and when traveling, can use the gmail app to still access email. I occasionally download all email on gmail to local systems for archiving. I used to use Yahoo many years ago (had a premium account), but once Google started offer the same services at no cost, I switched over.
As for privacy, well, any MTA in the transport pipeline can keep a copy of every message, so I have given up on worry about that. If I am really concerned about prying eyes, I can use encryption. If you think setting up your own MTA will protect againt snooping, it won't.
Note, I do recommend having your own domain. I have that, but still have everything go to my gmail account currently. Therefore, if something goes really awry with Google, I can change where my domain email goes to and not have to change my primary email address.
(Score: 2) by hendrikboom on Monday October 17 2016, @01:42PM
So you have a way of connecting your domain name to gmail and have Google accept it?
(Score: 2) by termigator on Wednesday October 19 2016, @02:07AM
Right now, I have an associate who hosts my domain, but I forward all my email for it to my gmail account. You can config your gmail account to send email with a different From address after you confirm you own that address.
Gmail also has the ability to route mail you send thru a specifc domains servers. When I was contracting for a company, I configured my gmail account to send email thru the companies server when I used the From identity of that company. This way the email appears to recipients as coming from that company and not gmail. With this, gmail will not put my gmail address as the Sender. Unfortunately, dumb ass MUAs like Outlook does not know how to handle Sender, From, and Reply-to properly.
Google does require verification you have control of the identity and you do have to provide the credentials for Google to be able to submit email on your behalf to the server.