If you’re worried about Yahoo not being able to keep your passwords safe from malicious actors or complying with the government to let it read over your emails and half a million other people’s to look for terrorist signatures, well, you can definitely skedaddle off to Gmail or Outlook or Mail.ru… oh, sorry about that.
But if your Yahoo account is a valuable business line, family and friends line or a lifeline and need to make sure that people can keep contacting you, you can forward your Yahoo mail to another account. Except that if you want to turn it on, you can’t.
Those who already have Mail Forwarding activated will keep having their mail forwarded to their current addresses, but they cannot add new addresses.
“This feature is under development,” reads a Yahoo Help page for the feature. “While we work to improve it, we’ve temporarily disabled the ability to turn on Mail Forwarding for new forwarding addresses.”
Mail Forwarding has been standard with email clients and an easy feature to implement for the past couple of decades. There shouldn’t be a technical reason as to why new accounts cannot be forwarded while any new feature is being worked on. It’s not clear exactly when this feature was deactivated, but it appears to be well after the initial account credential leak.
Your best bet for now if you want to hop off of Yahoo is to have another client, such as Thunderbird, POP over all your emails and archive them, then set a permanent vacation responder to direct people to your new address.
Verizon has denied asking Yahoo for a discount on its asking price for its acquisition in the wake of these events.