Yahoo has been dealing with a lot of turmoil lately after it came to light that the Internet company’s services were hacked in 2014 which compromised approximately half a billion accounts. In addition to that, the firm faced a lot of negative reactions to its decision to disable the automatic email forwarding feature of Yahoo Email earlier this week. Not surprisingly, when you’re a large company that admitted that 500 million of its users were compromised by hackers and your first move is to hinder any potential users’ attempts of moving to another service, you’re not buying yourself a lot of goodwill.
Luckily, Yahoo won’t end this saga on such a negative note and has actually just introduced a completely new feature that’s available to all existing Yahoo accounts. It’s called Recent Activity and its name is pretty self-explanatory. The feature has been designed in a fashion similar to Google’s event tracking and while it’s not as robust, it’s still useful for checking out any recent changes made to your account or devices from which the account was accessed. Granted, the current user interface is still a bit chaotic as the IP address, location, device, and timestamp of each individual event aren’t all available in a single place but are actually distributed throughout two menus instead of just one. Still, if Yahoo only churned out this feature after the aforementioned data breach came to light, it did a good job considering that the company became aware of the incident less than a month ago.
So, more design improvements are hopefully coming soon. While this feature obviously won’t directly help compromised users to deal with the aftermath of their data being stolen, it at least enables them to track any suspicious activities of their accounts. Of course, that isn’t to say they shouldn’t change their account passwords. If you’re still adamant at switching to a different email service, note that Yahoo stated that the automatic email forwarder will be turned on again in the near future. If you don’t care about that and just want to delete your entire account, you’re going to have to visit Yahoo Help pages while logged into them with a Yahoo account. It’s not the most elegant solution but it’s the only one available at the moment.