In the wake of a cyberattack which exposed 500 million accounts, Yahoo has made it more difficult for its users to move to a different email provider.
The web giant disabled its automatic email forwarding tool at the start of October, just weeks after it was hit by the biggest data breach of all time.
The Associated Press, which broke the story, reported that the forwarding service still works for those who set it up in the past.
Jason Danner, an IT business owner in New Zealand, told AP he had noticed the change after recently attempting to switch email providers.
He told the news agency: “That all this ... has ceased to function when they’ve been getting a lot of press seems extremely dubious to me.”
Privacy campaigners have since urged users to close their accounts after Reuters revealed Yahoo had been scanning incoming emails in realtime at the best of the NSA or the FBI.
The NSA whistleblower Edward Snowden tweeted:
Yahoo did not respond to AP’s request for comment, but directed reporters to a post on its help site which reads:
“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.”