Email (AT&T-Yahoo) Forwarding Gone Forever? Yahoo to Follow?

Many years ago when I first signed up with AT&T as my ISP (via one of the Baby Bells the "new" AT&T subsequently bought), that membership was touted as including a number of AT&T email accounts.  Many years ago AT&T gave, sold, or contracted its email service to Yahoo. Basically all of our AT&T email accounts became Yahoo free email accounts, the same account that anyone can get direct from Yahoo for free.

Subsequent to AT&T's dumping our email accounts, Oath bought Yahoo.  Oath was owned by Verizon.  Isn't it odd that AT&T had "given" our email accounts to a competitor? But I digress.

On 9/21/2021 Verizon sold 90% of Oath to Apollo Global Management.  Apollo is a private equity holding company.  They have no interest in customers, only in making money.  I've no doubt they'll be putting the screws to whoever is currently running Yahoo.

Effective at the beginning of 2021 Yahoo (again?) decided to remove the email forwarding feature from its free accounts.  As far as I know they made no effort to publicize this change - I certainly never got any type of notice.  To retain this feature one can subscribe to their Mail Plus email for $5 a month.  Guess they're not making enough money from the incessant ads that appear during the login process to their free accounts.  However, apparently the folks at Yahoo haven't yet gotten around to making this change on all accounts.  I had several email accounts and two of them forwarded emails to my original account, and I use an email app on my PC to access that one account, thus receiving emails from all three accounts in one place.  Recently I discovered that one of those two accounts was no longer forwarding emails ... so I hadn't seen several months of emails from that account.

Given that email forwarding was included in the email accounts that were part of the ISP service we bought from AT&T, it's clear that AT&T long ago lost sight of it's oft advertised customer focus.  Customer focus only comes into play when there's money to be made.  I get that making a profit is what companies are about, but the spin that anything else is really on their radar is an unwarranted embellishment (most kind word I could think of).

If AT&T were really customer focused they'd find a way to give their internet customers the email accounts that were part of the deal when they made the sale at the outset.  Perhaps this lack of customer focus is in some way related to how poorly their stock is viewed of late.

The bottom line seems to be that if this feature loss is bothersome to enough people, presumably the only place to protest would be Yahoo managment.  Good luck with that.  I doubt it would produce any feature restoral.  But I, for one, will be working my way out of the Yahoo Mail morass.  One, because of their poor "customer focus", but just as importantly because their lack thereof may eventually lead to their demise.  Forbes seems to agree ... see https://www.forbes.com/sites/georgebradt/2021/09/10/why-apollo-and-jim-lanzone-are-doomed-to-fail-with-yahoo/?sh=543a526e1ad7