Yahoo temporarily disables automatic email forwarding

Yahoo temporarily disabled its automatic email forwarding feature early this month. Several users report this to the Associated Press. Users who already had the function enabled are not affected by the measure.

Disabling the feature makes it difficult for users to switch email providers, AP writes. They often use this feature to automatically forward e-mail from the old address to a new address. Yahoo’s support page only states that “the feature is in development” and that it will be disabled as long as the internet giant is “working on improvements.”

Yahoo finds itself in difficult waters after it became known that the service scanned incoming e-mail messages from users at the request of US intelligence services. Yahoo would not have challenged the request at the time, because it estimated that resistance would be of no avail. Message scanning would also have been the reason for the departure of security chief Alex Stamos to Facebook.

In addition, the internet giant recently announced that in 2014 state hackers stole the data of half a billion users. Yahoo has not yet released any additional information about the possible perpetrators. The company is currently in an acquisition by the American provider Verizon.