Yahoo! halts! email! forwarding! to! outside! email! addresses! Yahoo! has “temporarily disabled” the ability to forward email from its messaging services. As the Plunging Palace's support page helpfully explains, “Automatic forwarding sends a copy of incoming messages from one account to another.” That page goes on to say the feature is “under development.” “While we work to improve it …
I know when I've moved my own as well as others, most modern mail platforms will "pull" content in via IMAP or POP3 from the old platform to the new shiny.
At least Outlook.com and GMail allow this. I'm assuming Yahoo! haven't disabled POP3 access - which means that people can still move off their ghastly email system to something marginally better.
Fuckers regardless though.
I forward them out to another provider which does IMAP IDLE (because Yahoo doesn't) so I can actually get timely notifications without hammering my mobile's battery.
It's still working for now and I've been using this setup for years. If it suddenly stops I really should pull my finger out and sort out a new address.
> At least Outlook.com and GMail allow [POP3 and IMAP].
By default Google will freeze your account if you try to connect through POP or IMAP from an "unusual location" (that may be such suspiciously alien places as "the coffee shop across the street"). Because, you know, a "cloud"-based email adress is to be used only from your place of residence. Totally makes sense. I stopped using their services, I still have 3 yahoo-powered addies (2 for junk), all of which I access exclusively through IMAP, from around the world and without a hitch.
When my wife stupidly clicked on a link around when btinternet where making modiifcations to their email system she compromised her account and logged on to find all her emails gone plus her contact list and of course phishing emails sent to all her contacts.
Although we later deleted the account I first checked through ever option in the settings and found that a forward had been set up that would have forwarded a copy of every incoming email somewhere else.
So clearly the 'hackers' were relying on the fact the majority of users would simply regain control of their account, change the password and think themselves safe.
I assume Yahoo are putting some new safe guards in such that for instance the account holder is informed of any new forwarding configuration.
Having had to clean up some hacked Yahoo accounts, I have previously found that there is a way of creating an email forwarder for the Yahoo account that is often not visible in the account settings. Maybe that's one of the bugs they're trying to un-develop.
Ahhh... that brings me to my my slightly angry and possibly OTT wishlist (similar thing with a family member's hacked Yahoo account).
I would love to see... mandatory 2FA at login, a single use PIN code required from your mobile before a forward address is set up, a one-off re-validation of all existing email forwarding, a BIG CLEAR MESSAGE every time you login if any email forwards are set up on your account, and an easily accessible "delete all email forwarding" button.
Obviously, might get in the way of pushing Yahoo! news at users, but surely that's got to be more important than click-through advertising income. What? It isn't?... ;)
About three years ago I tried to get the "Reply to" option to work on my Y! mail account (not my main account). Y! resolutely refused to include the reply to email address in any email sent out through it with the header entry set as "Reply-To: ;" (generating a bouncy email to ";" for anyone who did click reply).
This should have been pretty simple to fix but three support tickets in as many months yielded nothing and I understand it remains broken. I gave up and moved everything on that account to a paid for IMAP provider which has been faultless over the last 2.5 years.
The only explanation for this sudden rash of development/debug work at Yahoo can only be nefarious. I'd go with the lock in theory if I thought Yahoo were clever enough to think it up...
Been with Yahoo for over 15 yrs, most of them happy enough. Recently though, more spam, outages, slowdowns, errors when attaching files -- wanting mobile phone number "in case you get locked out" (i.e. so they can flog it to phone marketeers).
Yahoo finally admit to a security meltdown kept secret for years and start nagging ME about security !
Change password, don't use my iPhone, apps or sites like mail.com to forward mails.
All guaranteed to drive users into the arms Gmail.
To receive Yahoo Group mail... many years ago I joined a local buy and sell group(craigslist kind of thing)
Nothing sensitive there... so until Yahoo falls on their face, I just use it to get messages from the buy sell board... I'll just change my password frequently.
As the Yahoo email business is now dead.
Why? Well, the bad guys have millions of account logins, many of which will be for "zombie" accounts that the original owners have forgotten about. So they will be used to send spam and phishing mails, which at the moment will evade spam filters as they are from a "legitimate" mail server. When everyone gets fed up, and either blacklists yahoo.com mail, or up-scores the spamminess in their spam filters, the Yahoo users will find that their mail is never delivered. Sorting this out would take years.
What's that you say? If a company leaked like a sieve and secretly helped spooks, users might be inclined to take their business elsewhere? But for the sake of convenience those folks abandoning the sinking ship might set up their old Yahoo! account so it forwards mail to their new inboxes?
Or could it be that hackers are forwarding emails on to themselves and Yahoo! have only just thought that this could be an issue.
I'm not surprised with this new change seeing for years everything Yahoo! go to the gutter. I had a mail account with them. It most probably had been forwarding mail to my main email account elsewhere. But seeing the general level of Y! service, I stopped using it years ago and hopefully it's been long blocked (at least I do not get any spam from them).
I am however surprised that there are people who still use this crap.
Yahoo! deserve to rot.
If Yahoo! can manipulate its users to this extent and they stick with them, the rest of us are all doomed because the Yahoo! fcukup will become the standard model for Facebook and others, going forward, i.e. not to give a shit regards NSA slurps, data leaks.
Really sorry we slurped all your data {by mistake}. Don't worry, it WILL BE used for whatever we fcuking well we please, because well, you're too damn lazy to care about your Privacy to do anything about it, i.e. to move your data elsewhere, secure your data (with a decent password) / leave.
What has hardly been discussed is why the NSA thought imposing this data slurp on Yahoo! was somehow "morally fine" and on getting the enforcement passed, implemented said Policy of scanning all of Yahoo! email for stuff, without thinking out the consequences of their actions, especially now its been leaked.
Its probably worth keeping an eye on the movements/dismissals of all high level security related Personnel at these companies, if you value Privacy. Someone walks, check their twitter / Linkedin.
Given the timeframe of these hacks, who's to know if Yahoo's previous head of Security did such a good job of leaking data of 500m users without consequence (as it seems), he'd be a rather good employee of Facebook, in the circumstances, to further their aims.
It means no more crap forwarded from the yahoo account I lost access* to 10 years ago, but which still forwards a dozen pieces of tat to my favourite gmail account every day.
It was hacked the other year, and yahoo reset the password, but sent it to my back-up account, which I had also just lost (at VERY short notice - ie the bastards cut me off the day after I gave a months notice).
Why change the name? It fits!
Quote:"Yahoos are legendary beings in the novel Gulliver's Travels (1726) by Jonathan Swift.
Swift describes them as being filthy and with unpleasant habits, resembling human beings far too closely for the liking of protagonist"
(From Wikipedia)
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