Yahoo said that it is working to bring back the automatic email forwarding feature, which users recently found to have been temporarily disabled.

A previous report revealed that Yahoo has disabled the feature since the start of October, which will make it harder for users who have lost confidence in Yahoo's email service to switch to another provider.

With automatic email forwarding, users will be able to have the email that they receive in their Yahoo account automatically sent to another email address that they have assigned to the feature. This would be of great help for users who would like to drop their Yahoo email address and instead use another inbox such as Gmail, as the user will be sure to not miss any new emails that may be sent to their Yahoo account.

If the feature is enabled, while users send word around of their new email address, they would continue to receive emails from address that are not in their contacts list, which is important for individuals or businesses who have publicly advertised their email addresses.

According to Yahoo though, the feature is under development, which is why it was disabled. Users who have already previously set up automatic email forwarding will not have any problems as the feature will still work, but for users who would like to do so, there is no choice but to wait.

The timing of Yahoo's shutdown of the feature is suspect, as two major security scandals have erupted concerning the company. The first one is the disclosure of a data breach that happened two years ago, which compromised 500 million accounts, and the second one is the report that Yahoo installed software that scanned user emails as ordered by the United States government.

In light of these issues, it is thought that Yahoo decided to turn off the automatic email forwarding feature to prevent a mass exodus of users away from the service. It does not help that Yahoo said that it is developing the feature as the reason for the temporary shutdown, when it is a basic one that has been around for years and probably requires no further development.

While waiting for Yahoo to put the feature back up, users who are looking to switch to another email service have limited options. There is always the option of managing two inboxes, which could become difficult for high-volume email addresses. Users can also choose to utilize the vacation responder feature, which will send a reply to all incoming emails regarding the user's new address.