Yahoo Disables Email Auto-Forwarding,Makes It Harder for Users to Move On

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.

"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.

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Dropbox to shutter Mailbox email and Carousel photo apps

So much for the strategy of killer apps to boost cloud storage use.

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Dropbox will shut down its Mailbox email app next year, two years after it arrived in the iOS App Store atop a mountain of hype. The company is also shutting down Carousel, an app for syncing and sharing photos.

Explaining the decision, Dropbox said it is trying to increase its focus on collaboration. The Mailbox team alluded to this in its own announcement, saying that “we realized there’s only so much an email app can do to fundamentally fix email.” The team will now focus on streamlining “the workflows that generate so much email in the first place.”

As for Carousel, the team’s goodbye letter hinted that the app just wasn’t very popular. “[O]ver the past year and a half, we’ve learned the vast majority of our users prefer the convenience and simplicity of interacting with their photos directly inside of Dropbox,” the team wrote.

Why this matters: Mailbox was once a shining example of what mobile email should be, with an interface focused on swiping, and helpful features like a snooze button for responding to important emails. At its launch in February 2013, Mailbox required joining a waitlist just to use it, and Dropbox acquired the app a month later. Mailbox has since expanded to other platforms such as Android and Mac, but similar features have also come to other email clients, including CloudMagic, Google Inbox, and Microsoft Outlook.

Carousel wasn’t quite as unique among photo apps, though alongside Mailbox it pushed the idea that killer apps could lead to greater use of paid cloud storage. Again, it’s a strategy that larger rivals Google, Apple, and Microsoft have all espoused, with deep cloud storage hooks built into their respective products. It seems Dropbox is now abandoning that path, and focusing on “collaboration” instead.

What Mailbox and Carousel users need to know

The impending demise of Mailbox and Carousel could cause problems for heavy users, so Dropbox has posted some FAQs on how to proceed.

For Mailbox, the service will shut down on February 26, 2016, and all data will be deleted within 30 days. Users won’t lose any actual emails—those are still stored with Gmail or iCloud—and all lists will remain as labels in Gmail or folders in iCloud under the [Mailbox] header. However, any drafts written in Mailbox will be deleted, so users will need to save those manually before the cut-off date. Users will retain the 1GB of Dropbox bonus space they received for linking their accounts to Mailbox.

Dropbox says it considered open-sourcing Mailbox, but ultimately decided against it. 

Carousel, meanwhile, has a shutdown date of March 31, 2016. From then on, users can view and back up their photos through the Dropbox app, though the iOS app doesn’t support album view currently. Flashbacks will no longer be available after the cutoff date, nor will shared albums, though Dropbox will release an export tool for the latter. Users will retain any bonus space they earned by installing the app.

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