Last month, Yahoo revealed that its services suffered a massive data breach in 2014 which compromised half a billion users. Given that news and the fact that Yahoo itself was unaware of the hacking attack for approximately two years, it wasn’t surprising that many Yahoo Mail users decided to look for a different service. Unfortunately for them, the process of switching to a different email provider was hindered by the fact that Yahoo turned off its automatic email forwarding feature. Setting up a new email without automatically receiving emails from your old provider is obviously a hassle for some and a complete nightmare for others so this move was heavily criticized by the general public. Soon after that public backlash, Yahoo’s representatives stated that the Internet company is “working” on bringing the feature back to Yahoo Mail.
Three days later, that promise came true. As of a few hours ago, you can once again set up automatic email forwarding from your Yahoo Mail account to any other email address you choose. It’s worth noting that while announcing the return of email forwarding, Yahoo’s vice president of product management Michael Albers said nothing that would imply this removal had something to do with the aforementioned data breach or reports that users are migrating to other services. In a short blog post published on the Yahoo Mail Tumblr page earlier today, Albers apologized for the interruption and explained that the email forwarder was temporarily disabled for upgrade purposes.
More specifically, Yahoo’s VP of product management stated that it wasn’t the forwarder itself that was being upgraded but that it had to be disabled in order for the Yahoo Mail platform as a whole to be upgraded. Unfortunately, he didn’t go into any specifics regarding the matter but has simply recommended users to connect their Yahoo inboxes directly to their preferred client instead of using the email forwarder. Last but not least, Albers reminded us of all new features recently added to Yahoo Mail, including multiple inbox support and account activity tracking which Yahoo introduced yesterday. While the email forwarder could have certainly been removed for upgrade purposes, one thing is sure – the timing of the removal could have been better.