Some Yahoo users finding it hard to exit amid breach talk

LONDON -- As Yahoo's embattled email service suffers through a slew of bad news, some users are finding it hard to leave.

Automatic email forwarding was disabled at the beginning of the month, several users said.

While those who've set up forwarding in the past are unaffected, some who want to leave over recent hacking and surveillance revelations are struggling to switch to rival services.

"This is all extremely suspicious timing," said Jason Danner, who runs an information technology business in Auckland, New Zealand, and is trying to quit Yahoo after 18 years with the provider.

Yahoo Inc. declined to comment on the recent change beyond pointing to a three-line notice on Yahoo's help site which says the company temporarily disabled the feature "while we work to improve it."

Like forwarding postal mail, email forwarding makes sure users don't miss important messages as they swap one address for another.

The feature has been "a basic concept for 15 years for just about every email provider out there," said Brian McIntosh, who owns a small technology business.

"All of a sudden it's under development," McIntosh said. "And only at Yahoo."

Yahoo's users have been hit by a one-two punch of disclosures.

In September, the company revealed hackers stole the personal information of half a billion people in 2014, a record-breaking theft that appears to have gone undiscovered for about two years.

More recent revelations concern reports Yahoo opened its users' emails to government surveillance .

Although it's unclear whether either issue will lead to an exodus from Yahoo, several people said they were leaving or had left the service because of the negative headlines.

"Being an American, I think there's a certain amount of expectation that some surveillance goes behind the scenes all the time," said Merissa Silk, an expatriate mobile-product manager living in Sydney. "But providing the U.S. government unrestricted access -- that really, really violates our privacy."

Silk has skipped the email forwarding, instead leaving an out-of-office message on her Yahoo account that provides her new address and reads in part: "Following recent data and privacy breaches, I will be discontinuing use of Yahoo Mail."

For those seeking more than an out-of-office message to manage their old inbox, Yahoo's decision to disable email forwarding is a source of frustration.

McIntosh said his business, located in Canada Lake, New York, would have to delay a client's planned transition to a Microsoft email provider.

Danner said Yahoo's decision to do away with such a "basic function" left him dumbfounded.

"That all this ... has ceased to function when they've been getting a lot of press seems extremely dubious to me," he said.