Slashdot Mirror
Yahoo Disables Automatic Email Forwarding Feature, Making It Difficult For Users To Leave (reuters.com)
After it was revealed that Yahoo secretly scanned customer emails for U.S. intelligence agencies, now's as good of time as any to leave Yahoo Mail. However, the company has made it more difficult to leave by disabling the automatic email forwarding feature. Reuters reports: While those who have set up forwarding in the past are unaffected, users who would want to leave following recent hacking and surveillance revelations are struggling to shift to rival services, the AP reported on Monday. The company has been under scrutiny from investors after disclosing last month that at least 500 million user accounts were stolen from its network in 2014. The AP said that several users were leaving or had already left the service because of the negative headlines. The company's website says that the "automatic email forwarding" feature is under development and has been temporarily disabled.
I have several emails attached to accounts that I do not use at all whatsoever. The only reason they still exist is because I have them forwarded. If I lost that feature I'd just kill them completely.
I still suffer from a verizon email address from three ISP's ago. I now host my own....email is too important to trust gmail OR Yahoo OR anyone else.
So, there's this:
While those who have set up forwarding in the past are unaffected, ...
and, also this:
The company's website says that the "automatic email forwarding" feature is under development and has been temporarily disabled.
So... forwarding already enabled is unaffected but otherwise it's disabled - 'cause it's under "development" -- even though it's actually, already working?
It must have been something you assimilated. . . .
First of all, this is totally a sh*thead thing to do. Email services are worked on ALL THE TIME, while up and running. There should never be a reason that forwarding, or any other aspect of email, should have to be disabled while it's worked on.
As a work-around, you could probably setup an automated "vacation reply" of some kind, set it for as long of a time as possible, and just put an informative note that includes your new email address. Of course this wouldn't solve the issues where you're being sent email from some automated service that does meaningful things like, bill you for that thing that you forgot you're billed for every month, but it's something.
Politics; n. : A religion whereby man is god.
Here are some other cutting-edge email features currently under development at Yahoo:
* WYSIWYG display of text
* Mouse Support
* Select multiple emails to delete
* CC: feature (in beta)
maybe they're only planning to forward to other companies that are also scanning the email.
They're facing a mass exodus and all of a sudden new autoforward is disabled?
As the Church Lady would say.... How Con-VEEEEENient...
General Relativity: Space-time tells matter where to go; Matter tells space-time what shape to be.
This company is looking more and more like the Titanic (film), in the ways the ship is being "sold" to the sea of Verizon, and wanting to take 'em all souls down below by not letting them use lifeboats properly. Even the music playing 'till the very end to keep passengers amused as if nothing happened. Let's face it: the only way a company can save any kind of face from such a disaster is much like what Samsung is doing with the note 7: offer refunds, launch amazing new product pronto (fingers crossed for that, we don't want to lose that Android player, even if a seriously bloated one at that, the alternative is a closed ecosystem with an Apple and a price to match).
But do you really wanna know what hurts the most? I'm a Yahoo Mail user since like 1999, and to this date I haven't gotten a single email, notification, anything at all stating the leak details through "common channels": I didn't get a CS email; I didn't get a site-bound notification in the UI; I didn't get an email on my alternative, out-of-Yahoo account; I've been searching their news feed since the first rumors and got no hits. It's flat out offensive. If I was an American citizen, or if such a thing as class action existed where I'm from, I would be suing their asses to oblivion (because only through a class can this have any meaning to a judge). I'm calling upon you Americans reading this: stick it up to them for us, they do not deserve a penny of the Verizon deal, and such a company deserves to be dismembered so that the actual talent it still has can move forward to real challenges, and the a-holes making these obviously economically-bound reasons can burn in the hell they're destined to.
I enabled auto-forwarding five years ago. I think it's been long enough since I last used my Yahoo account. Time to close it.
Scanning your email is standard practice ever since the wild success of Gmail, and Lavabit is long gone now - where are all of these dissatisfied people supposed to go? Unless they're planning to ::gasp:: pay for their email service, they don't have any other options.
Maybe if you're specifically worried about surveillance from law enforcement and you don't care who else reads your email, or who they sell your information to, or who those people sell your information to (probably law enforcement), then maybe you've got some choices. But it takes some pretty selective blinders to fall into that camp.
I used to use Gmail many moons ago, but ran into some fairly major problems with my account that Google couldn't be bothered to look into. So, for the last 8 years, I've ran my own email server out of my house.
It's a CentOS box running Scalix for the email stuff. It's got a web interface for email, you can install a plugin client side to make it so you can connect to it with Outlook if you so desire, or just use IMAP or POP. It's pretty easy to connect to with your phone's email client without having to pay for the premium active sync stuff. It's free up to 5 premium users (can use Outlook) and open source. If you want more premium users, then you pay for it. But for a home email server, 5 premium users is more than enough.
Only costs me $5/month for the static IP from my ISP to run, plus any time it takes when there are issues, which have been vanishingly rare, and the recycled hardware that it runs on from upgrading my main rig. Well worth it to me.
for about 8 years now. Has been ever since they started getting hacked non-stop around that time and I got tired of recovering my account. To be fair since they started doing 2 factor I've been fine, but I'd already moved on.
Hi! I make Firefox Plug-ins. Check 'em out @ https://addons.mozilla.org/en-US/firefox/addon/youtube-mp3-podcaster/
The easy solution is to create another account somewhere else and forward it to Yahoo. Start giving everyone your new address and access your email via Yahoo until everyone has made the switch. Then turn off forwarding and use only your new account. I know that seems mindlessly simple but apparently Yahoo thinks their customers can't figure it out.
...it is encouraging that enough people care enough to leave to make Yahoo do this.
pr0n - keeping monitor glass spotless since 1981.
Joke's on them. I have it set up in Thunderbird as IMAP.
I don't care so much about leaving as I mostly use it as a spam address. I'm using their servers and I don't see their atrocious interface or ads.
The point is that you start giving people a NEW email address and try to get most to start sending there, but for anyone who you miss and doesn't get the updated address, you won't miss their messages. Sure those will still be scanned, but over time the messages coming through Yahoo should be a smaller and smaller percentage of your overall email volume.
"People who think they know everything are very annoying to those of us who do."-Mark Twain
Yahoo account? Really. I generally use them to open an account I know is going to be spam slammed then ignore it after I'm fished with whatever system is trying to get a email account. pwgen is good for making passwords you don't intend to remember.
pwgen -sy 16 1
Necessity is the plea for every infringement of human freedom. It is the argument of tyrants; it is the creed of slaves.
Seriously. You can replicate your Yahoo mail structure locally with an IMAP connection. Then push the mail wherever you need it.
Granted, for people on low-speed connections this could be unfeasible. But still.
Chas - The one, the only.
THANK GOD!!!
And hope that any relevant mails on the account can be downloaded with POP3 or IMAP.
If builders built buildings the way programmers wrote programs, then the first woodpecker would destroy civilization.
One more compelling reason to give Marissa Mayer $44M dollars ?
Requiem for the American Dream
My first mail address was furnished by my bank, as a free service, not even tied to you remaining in the bank, in a neutral domain name. In those times, it seemed like a good idea to have it, as good free e-mail was then a scarce commodity.
Fast forward six years and the beginning of gmail, and they decide to drop the service. They didn't even transfer the domain to other service provider. They did a very lame thing of offering you another free service with a different domain. My inconveniences retiring that account were considerable, and to date I don't know if I lost any business due to some old contact not being able to mail me.
From them on, I have my own domain name, and a service provider that gives me mail services for that domain, for a small fee. I run now little risk of that kind of problems.
Rome taught me patience and assiduous application to detail. Virtues which temper the boldness of great, general views.
Why would you forward rather than just pick up the email for multiple accounts in the same mail client? This seems to be incredibly trivial to set up in any modern mail client, with an "integrated inbox" view if you want it or distinct accounts if you don't.
If you've received mails on secondary accounts that you want to keep, you can even file them in a folder on the primary account, thanks to the wonders of IMAP.
I got my own domain name back in about 1996. Since then I've moved ISPs several times and initially I simply redirected my email address to go through whichever pop/smtp servers were required. Once I worked out how to do it I now set things up so my mail gets redirected to my own mail server which runs happily on a really low powered mini-itx box (along with other stuff such as WWW services etc.)
Admittedly this is not something that your average "non computer geek" user can probably do so it's about time it was made much easier for any semi computer literate individual to set up. That way the local computer geeks can help the local community to stand on their own two feet and get off the corporate tit.
I can't for the life of me understand why anyone who is remotely computer literate would trust their email to be handled by a corporate mail provider ? All they do is fish through your emails to better spam you with crapvertisements, allow any old Tom, Dick & Harry to rummage through your email without a warrant, try to lock you in to their services and generally hold you, the customer (i.e. the product), in total disdain.
On which note if law enforcement have a valid reason to go through my emails then fine. As long as this has been sanctioned by a court of law then I've no problem with that. I've got absolutely nothing to hide but you're not looking at it without judicial oversight.
It's about time people got their heads out of their arses and simply stopped using corporate "cloud" and "mail" services. The bastards who run them are a bunch of abusive trolls who have zero respect for their "customers". I won't trust so much as a single zero bit that I've generated to the likes of Google, Microsoft, Yahooo etc. etc. Neither should you.
The whole point of the web is supposed to be a collection of ad hoc individuals being able to communicate with each other as equals. Accept nothing less !
Fuck corporate service providers. Fuck the "cloud".
Oh well, rant over. I trust this is one of the last nails that needs hammering into the coffin of Yahoo.
Sky subscribers are morons. They pay to be advertised at !
What is the point of setting up forwarding on a host that is scanning your mail? I do not get it.
Who says it was Yahoo's decision?
Is it not possible that they got an order from a three-letter agency to make migration as difficult as possible?
If the other email providers are playing hardball with the Government (doubtful, I grant you) then maybe they're just trying to close this particular cage before all the rats escape?
I know this all sounds a bit tinfoilhattish, but I'd say that is a reflection of the zeitgeist. 2016 has been weird.
Here is exactly what it looks like when you delete your Yahoo account:
> https://twitter.com/fulldecent...
I invite you to complete the process as well and post your own screenshots.
-- I was raised on the command line, bitch
Comment removed based on user account deletion
They just turned off the forwarder so every email doesn't get forwarded to yahoo@partnerprogram.nsa.gov anymore.
When the copyright term is "forever minus a day", live every day like it's the last.
They are removing the code from the "automatic email forwarding" that also send a copy to the NSA.
Will $CURRENT_YEAR be the year of the Linux Desktop?