Following Yahoo’s September announcement of a data breach affecting 500 million user accounts, the company has made it more difficult for Yahoo Mail users to transition to another email service. At the beginning of October, Yahoo disabled an email forwarding feature, which would allow users to automatically redirect incoming emails sent to their Yahoo address to another account. 
 
 (Disclosure: TechCrunch parent company Verizon is acquiring Yahoo.) 
 
 The AP first reported this change, citing conversations with several Yahoo customers who sought out the feature in wake of the news regarding the data breach. 
 
 Disabling email forwarding is a fairly transparent move aimed at stemming a potential exodus from Yahoo Mail to other email providers. 
 
 When asked about its decision to end support for email forwarding, Yahoo declined to comment and instead pointed the AP to a post on its Help Site explaining the feature’s status. 
 
 This message reads as follows: 
 
 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, Yahoo Mail users who had already set up forwarding won’t be affected, but anyone trying to forward their mail now won’t have the option. 
 
 Email forwarding, of course, is a basic feature that all major email providers today offer, and have for years. It’s not something new, or that would need to be shut down in order to be “improved”. Yahoo is simply making it very difficult for longtime Yahoo Mail users to switch to a new service. 
 
 That, in turn, could potentially keep customers’ accounts active – something that Yahoo may want to do given that Verizon’s deal to acquire Yahoo has not yet closed. (Recent reports indicate Verizon is now asking for a $1 billion discount, in fact.) 
 
 Mail forwarding is a crucial part of the switching process – much like forwarding postal mail, it ensures that no new emails will be missed, as you go about alerting your contacts to your new email address. It’s especially critical to those who receive incoming emails from people not already in their contacts list, like businesses who advertise their email address publicly, for example. 
 
 As a workaround, users who want to make the move to another account could switch on their vacation responder instead to automatically reply to emails with a note about their new address. 
 
 Others may decide to forego the forwarding process and simply delete their Yahoo Mail account entirely. 
 
 Well, unless Yahoo disables that option, too. 
 
 As it turns out, this isn’t the first example of Yahoo making it difficult to abandon its service following the news of the breach. Earlier this month, BT customers, whose email had been outsourced to Yahoo, also found that their ability to leave Yahoo had been disabled. 
 
 According to reports, BT/Yahoo customers could not forward their emails nor could they access the option that would allow them to delete their email accounts. 
 
 Even before the breach, Yahoo Mail had been on the decline, ceding users to rights like Hotmail and Gmail. As of this summer, Yahoo reported its email service supported roughly 250 million monthly active users, a number that has dropped steadily over the years. 
 
 Update, 10/10/16, 5:30 PM ET – 
 
 Yahoo shared the following statement with TechCrunch: ||||| LONDON (AP) — As Yahoo's embattled email service suffers through a slew of bad news, including a hack that compromised more than 500 million accounts , some users are finding it hard to leave. 
 
 Automatic email forwarding was disabled at the beginning of the month, several users told The Associated Press. 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 email provider. 
 
 Yahoo Inc. initially declined to comment on the recent change beyond pointing to a three-line notice on Yahoo's help site which says that that the company temporarily disabled the feature "while we work to improve it." 
 
 After the AP published this story, the company issued a statement saying Yahoo was working on getting automatic forwarding "back up and running as soon as possible." 
 
 In the meantime, the company said it continued to support other options such as multiple account management , which allows users to juggle several email services at once. 
 
 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 and first alerted The Associated Press to the issue. 
 
 "All of a sudden it's under development," McIntosh said in a telephone interview. "And only at Yahoo." 
 
 Yahoo's users have been hit by a one-two punch of disclosures. First, the company revealed in September that hackers stole the personal information of roughly a half billion people, a record-breaking theft that appeared to have gone undiscovered for some two years. More recent revelations concern reports that Yahoo opened its users' emails to government surveillance . 
 
 Although it's unclear whether either issue will lead to a real exodus from Yahoo, several people told AP they were leaving or had already 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 which 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, which is 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 suddenly 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 in a phone call. 
 
 ___ 
 
 Online: 
 
 Raphael Satter can be reached at: http://raphaelsatter.com
– Yahoo just made it harder for users to switch providers after some 500 million accounts were hacked and reports surfaced that the company perused user emails for the NSA. Users say the company disabled automatic email forwarding at the start of the month so that anyone hoping to send received emails to a new address is out of luck, reports the AP. The change doesn't affect users who set up email forwarding previously. Yahoo says the feature was temporarily disabled "as part of previously planned maintenance to improve its functionality" and will be "back up and running as soon as possible," but a user hoping to switch services after 18 years couldn't help but notice the "extremely suspicious timing." The feature has been "a basic concept for 15 years," another user says. The fact that "all of a sudden it's under development, and only at Yahoo … seems extremely dubious to me." Rightly so, per TechCrunch, since email forwarding wouldn't "need to be shut down in order to be 'improved.'" Yahoo notes its service allowing users to keep track of several email accounts at once is still active, but some have decided to abandon their accounts anyway. One Yahoo user tells the AP she's using an out-of-office message to notify people of her new address. "Following recent data and privacy breaches, I will be discontinuing use of Yahoo Mail," it reads. Rather delete your account for good? Hackread describes how here.