They say that bad things happen in threes, but for Yahoo Inc., that’s an understatement. After entering into an agreement with Verizon to sell off its core assets for $4.8 billion, Yahoo has been facing a number of issues. The latest is being considered by some as a “trick” to prevent people from moving to other email services.
Users of Yahoo mail apparently cannot auto-forward their email messages, a basic functionality of nearly every email client in the world today. When asked, the company said the service is undergoing an update:
“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 temporarily 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.”
But users aren’t convinced. One 18-year user of Yahoo Mail said that “this is all very suspicious timing,” while another user, a tech business owner, says that the auto-forwarding service was “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.”
That’s just the beginning of Yahoo’s problems. Yahoo handles British Telecomm’s webmail hosting, and users say they are unable to delete their Yahoo accounts. The company acknowledged the problem and said:
“We apologise to customers who have been unable to delete their Yahoo account. We are working quickly to sort this out and expect to have this fixed soon.”
A more worrying Reuters report shows that Yahoo has been scanning and sharing user emails with the FBI as part of the latter’s search for a unique string of characters that has been linked to a terrorist organization. Yahoo denies the implications of the report, says that it is “misleading” and that the company is a “law-abiding firm.”
All of this is unrelated to the Great Yahoo Hack of 2014 where 500 million user accounts were broken into. The issue only came to light about a month ago, and Yahoo is taking the heat for it in more ways than one. After the security compromise, there were reports that Verizon, which agreed to buy Yahoo’s core assets for $4.8 billion, is now asking for a hefty $1 billion discount on the sale price.
With so many problems – small and large – facing Yahoo, it’s going to be a painful transition getting under Verizon’s umbrella. The wireless giant will naturally want questions answered and all the facts presented before it signs on the dotted line.
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