Yahoo Restores Email Forwarding Service

Yahoo earlier this month turned off the ability to forward users’ email to an outside account. This followed the revelation in late September of a data breach that may have revealed data to hackers from up to half a billion user accounts.

Last week, Yahoo commented on the freeze. "The feature was temporarily disabled as part of previously planned maintenance to improve its functionality between a user's various accounts" and should be back soon, the company said.

The ability to auto-forward was important for Yahoo email users who wanted to be able to forward incoming mail to an account on another email service, so they would not have to log into their Yahoo accounts directly, post-hack. If you had forwarding set up before the interruption, it still worked; only new attempts to set up mail forwarding were affected.

Michael Albers, vice president of product management for Yahoo Mail, said Friday in a company blog post that the auto-forward function is working now.

"Last week, we temporarily disabled the ability to add new automatic forwarding in Yahoo Mail," he said. "As of today, auto-forward is enabled again for all Mail users. We apologize for the interruption."

Some users were suspicious about the timing of the auto-forwarding freeze. But as before, Yahoo cited platform updates as the reason.

"Why the pause?" Albers said. "Over the past year, Yahoo Mail has been upgrading its platform. 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. The feature was temporarily disabled as part of this process."