Yahoo Makes It Harder To Escape Its Service By Disabling Automatic Email Forwarding Feature

If you thought that it couldn’t possibly get even worse or weirder for Yahoo, think again. We offered a summary a couple of days ago of what’s been going down, from massive security breaches being kept a secret to the company caving in and catering to government intelligence agencies. Given all this bad news, it’s clear that a lot of people are pondering escaping the service – it’s advice we issued ourselves. But, those hoping to migrate to another email service by taking advantage of a super-standard email feature known as “automatic forwarding” are now out-of-luck.

Either this is incredible timing, or Yahoo has deliberately gone out of its way to cripple its own services, but users today are unable to use automatic forwarding to have their email that hits their @yahoo.com account be passed along to their new one, whether it be at Gmail, Outlook, or so forth. Yahoo’s excuse is that the feature is undergoing “development”.

That’s a hard excuse to believe, considering the fact that automatic email forwarding isn’t new. As mentioned above, it’s a standard fare feature – so what on Earth would need to be developed?

Fortunately for those who already had the feature enabled, nothing has changed, so it’s not as though Yahoo has deliberately severed the feature – it’s just preventing those wanting to set it up now from being able to do so.

Our advice, if you’re so technically inclined, enable POP3 at Yahoo, and then configure a POP3 connection in your new email client / service and let it suck down all those emails (just be sure that it doesn’t delete them outright from the origin, should you want to return or import to another email account later).

It just keeps going from worst to “even worse” with Yahoo.