Al posted about this over on his blog earlier this week. Yahoo has disabled the ability to forward email from one Yahoo account to an email account on a different system.
There is, of course, all sorts of speculation as to why forwarding has been disabled including speculation this has to do with holding on to accounts during the Verizon purchase. It’s certainly possible this is the case.
However, forwarding email is hard. Forwarding email on a large scale can result in spam blocks and delivery problems. It’s such an issue M3AAWG published a forwarding best practices document. It’s possible that Yahoo is making some changes on the back end to better implement the best practice recommendations. I don’t know, but it’s possible that Yahoo is telling the truth that they’re improving technology.
Yahoo disabled forwarding
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My theory is that it’s 2/3 trying to hold onto users, 1/3 actual abuse due to account takeovers, e.g., bad guy looks at mailbox, sees mail from bank, sets up a forward, does a password reset at the bank, and due to the forward the real user never sees the reset and doesn’t know until too late that her bank account’s been stolen.
Banks need to make 2 factor authentication mandatory. In the UK, it is still optional that when logging into your account, you can use an external to confirm device (use to enter pin online) when transferring money from 1 account to an external recipient. Such devices need to be used as part of the registration process. It is not enough to have 2 sets of a password and pin along with a user ID. The industry needs to do more and collaborate!