Yahoo's email forwarding has been disabled in what TechCrunch claimed on Monday was an effort to keep Yahoo Mail users from leaving the service following September's announcement of a data breach affecting 500 million accounts.
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The forwarding feature allows users to automatically redirect incoming emails sent to their Yahoo address to another account. TechCrunch said Yahoo disabled its email forwarding in early October.
A Yahoo Help Site post addressed the change.
"This feature is under development," said the Yahoo post. "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."
Yahoo told TechCrunch on Monday that the disabling of email forwarding was part of a "planned maintenance."
"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," Yahoo told TechCrunch. "… Users can expect an update to the auto-forward functionality soon. In the meantime, we continue to support multiple account management."
Yahoo user Jason Danner, an information technology business owner in Auckland, New Zealand, told The Associated Press he was attempting to leave Yahoo after using the service for 18 years.
"This is all extremely suspicious timing," Danner told the AP, referring to Yahoo disabling the email forwarding tool.
Brian McIntosh, another tech business owner, shared those suspicions, and told the AP that email forwarding has been a "basic concept for 15 years for just about every email provider out there. All of a sudden it's under development. And only at Yahoo."
Yahoo announced last month that data from at least 500 million of its accounts had been stolen in late 2014 by what it believed was a "state-sponsored actor," reported CNN. The company recommended that its users change their passwords and security questions.
Yahoo said at the time that it did not believe financial data like bank account numbers and credit card data were breached in the stolen information, noted CNN.
Verizon Communications Inc. chief executive Lowell McAdam told a technology conference on Monday that his company was not planning on walking away from a deal to buy Yahoo because of the breach, reported the Wall Street Journal.
Verizon announced in July that it was purchasing Yahoo for $4.8 billion, per WSJ.
McAdam on Monday called Yahoo "a real value asset" but continued: "In fairness we are still understanding what was going on and defining whether it was a material impact on the business or not."
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