Aaaand now Yahoo has turned email forwarding back on? What is going on?

Back and forth

Over the past few years, you’ve probably noticed that you have fewer contacts with a Yahoo email address. Those numbers are likely to decline even further in the wake of several major slip-ups by the once-great tech company.

Can’t forward this

In early October, Consumerist reported Yahoo Mail users began complaining that the provider would no longer auto-forward emails to another address. Yahoo’s help page explained, “While we work to improve it, we’ve temporarily disabled the ability to turn on Mail Forwarding for new forwarding addresses.”

It seemed unlikely that the provider could be having technical difficulties with this simple email function that has been around for years.

Since people often use forwarding to transition their contacts and subscriptions to a new provider, some users began to suspect that Yahoo was trying to make it difficult for users to bail on them.

Coincidental timing

However, as of last Friday, Yahoo reintroduced the feature after what Michael Albers, VP of Product Management, called a temporary measure to allow the company to install upgrades. “This has allowed us to bring a better search experience to Yahoo Mail, add multiple account support, and improve performance as we quickly scale this new system globally,” Albers said via Tumblr.

Nonetheless, many users still wonder if Yahoo is trying to slow down the exodus.

More and more users are fleeing from Yahoo in favor of other providers, particularly after last month’s announcement that more than 500 million accounts had been compromised in a security breath. According to Yahoo, the data was stolen in 2014, and included information such as names, email addresses, phone numbers, birthdays, security questions and answers, and more.

Government interference

Perhaps even more disturbing than the hack: insiders sources reported that, at the request of either the FBI or the NSA, Yahoo had created a tool that would allow the government to easily search all users’ emails for information. At first, Yahoo would only respond that it “complies with the laws of the United States,” then later denied the existence of the mail scanning software.

Regardless of whether or not these rumors are true, they may be the last nail in Yahoo’s coffin.

#Yahoo