Yahoo ! Disabled Email Forwarding - No way to go out

Yahoo! has disabled automatic email forwarding -- a feature that lets its users forward a copy of incoming emails from one account to another.

The company has faced lots of bad news regarding its email service in past few weeks. Last month, the company admitted a massive 2014 data breach that exposed account details of over 500 Million Yahoo users.

If this wasn't enough for users to quit the service, another shocking revelation came last week that the company scanned the emails of hundreds of millions of its users at the request of a U.S. intelligence service last year.

That's enough for making a loyal Yahoo Mail user to switch for other rival alternatives, like Google Gmail, or Microsoft's Outlook.

Yahoo Mail Disables Auto-Forwarding; Making It Hard to Leave

But as Yahoo Mail users are trying to leave the email service, the company is making it more difficult for them to transition to another email service.

That's because since the beginning of October, the company has disabled Yahoo Mail's automatic email forwarding feature that would allow users to automatically redirect incoming emails from their Yahoo account to another account, reported by the Associated Press.

All of a sudden it's under development? Here's what a post on the company's help page reads about the feature's status:

"This feature is under development. While we work to improve it, we've temporarily disabled the ability to turn on Mail Forwarding for new forwarding addresses. If you've already enabled Mail Forwarding in the past, your email will continue to forward to the address you previously configured."

In other words, only users who already had the feature turned ON in the past are out of this trouble, but users who are trying to turn ON automatic email forwarding now have no option.

Yahoo has shared the following statement about the recent move:

"We're working to get auto-forward back up and running as soon as possible because we know how useful it can be to our users. The feature was temporary disabled as part of previously planned maintenance to improve its functionality between a user’s various accounts. Users can expect an update to the auto-forward functionality soon. In the meantime, we continue to support multiple account management."

Yahoo is trying to save its Verizon Acquisition Deal

The move to turn off the email forwarding option could be an attempt to keep its customers’ accounts active because any damage to the company at this time is crucial when Yahoo seeks to sell itself to Verizon.

The Yahoo acquisition deal has not yet closed, and Verizon Communications has reportedly asked for a $1 Billion discount off of Yahoo's $4.83 Billion sales price.

As a workaround, you could switch on your vacation responder instead to automatically reply to emails with a note about your new email address.

Delete Your Yahoo Account Before It's Too Late

You can also forego the forwarding process and simply delete your Yahoo Mail account entirely, until and unless Yahoo disables that option, too.

As the Reg media reports that British Telecoms customers, whose email had been outsourced to Yahoo, have not been able to set up automatic email forwarding or even access the option to delete their accounts.

"Sorry, the delete feature is currently unavailable. This feature will become available by the end of September," the error message reads.

RIP, Ray Tomlinson - The Creator of EMAIL, dies at 74

A computing legend who 'changed the way the world communicates' has died.

RAY TOMLINSON, the man who invented email as we know it today and picked the @ symbol for email addresses, passed away at the age of 75 following an apparent heart attack Saturday morning, according to reports.

Hard to believe but 'the godfather of email' has passed away.

His death was confirmed by Mike Doble, director of corporate PR at Tomlinson's employer Raytheon.

"A true technology pioneer, Ray was the man who brought us the email in the early days of networked computers," Doble said in a statement confirming Tomlinson's death.

The Internet reacted with sadness over the death of Tomlinson, who became a legend for his invention in 1971 of a system that allowed a user on one network to send a message to other computer users on other networks.

"Thank you, Ray Tomlinson, for inventing email and putting the @ sign on the map. #RIP," Gmail tweeted yesterday.

Tomlinson Introduced @ in Email Address

At the time of his invention, Tomlinson was working on ARPANET – predecessor of the modern Internet – at research and design company Bolt Beranek and Newman (now BBN Technologies).

Tomlinson used @ symbol in the email address in order to separate the username from the host name.

By the 1990s email had become a pillar of the Internet and Tomlinson was inducted into the Internet Hall of Fame in 2012, though he could not say what the very first email sent back in 1971 actually said.

Tomlinson said in an interview with the New York Times in 2009 that the email was just random strings of text, saying:

"I sent a number of test messages to myself from one machine to the other. The test messages were entirely forgettable and, therefore, forgotten."

Thanks to Tomlinson's invention that powers over a Billion and a half users communicating across the traditional barriers of time and space. #RIPRayTomlinson