What can be done to keep email forwarding from "going away"?

It would have helped if you had provided a link to that notice.  How did you find it in the first place?  Anyway found it.

Email account forwarding is going away

I wondered why they left the forwarding setting out of the "new" webmail layout.  I thought it was a "bug" or over-site.  That's because forwarding can still be set through the "classic" webmail with the POP & Forwarding option.  Maybe the notice only applies to the "full" webmail.   Of course if that were the case why specify a date in the notice at all since it's already gone in the "full" settings? 

The whole thing seems a bit one sided too.  They are going to let external accounts to forward into att email but not allow att email to forward out to external email accounts.  I must be missing the reasoning here.

If they really remove the ability to forward out then that would be another reason to dump att/yahoo as your email service.  If you do switch then change all your myAT&T email contact info (e.g.,any email addresses and email recovery address - of course that shouldn't be your att email address in the first place) to the new service.  Also many other email services have the ability to link accounts, for example, access the att account just as an email client app would access it via POP protocol, but view it through the new service's webmail (if you insist on using webmail).  There is no way for att to stop that function without disabling POP entirely and screwing up all users who use POP protocol in their email client apps to access att email.  Besides that notice says they are not going to do that and still allow client access.

"How did you find it in the first place?"

"I wondered why they left the forwarding setting out of the "new" webmail layout. "

Maybe these (the first being an example of minimal notification) are not coincidences.  Sorry ATT, you have too often acted unethically to give you the benefit of the doubt now.

Maybe these (the first being an example of minimal notification) are not coincidences.

None of the att notices/articles are "announced".  The only way they are found (at least how I find them) is to be lucky enough to stumble upon a thread where the poster somehow found the article of interest and mentions it in their post (I'll give you a kudo for that).  This thread is one such example.  And that's what led me to ask how you found that announcement in the first place?

And yes, now that I am aware of that announcement omitting forwarding in the "new" webmail UI almost certainly is not a coincidence.  The only question now is will they take it out of the basic/classic UI or leave it in and it simply will no longer work.

"How did you find it in the first place?"

I do not recall exactly. I have never used the email address ATT gave me so I never login to ATT's email client.  But I wanted to make sure if anything was sent to it that it would get forwarded to a place where I would see it. I figured I had set the account up that way when I first got it but wantd to verify.  So I got on ATT's site and starting snooping around for instructions on how to setup account forwarding. That probably had me ending up on ATT's "Basic email features support" help page, where I found the article on forwarding going away.

Hmm, ok.  Of course to set up the forwarding in the first place it wants to send a verify email address to the email account you are trying to forward to so that alone would have confirmed it would be reaching your target account.  My initial search based on you first post didn't turn up that notice in the results.  I only finally found it when trying alternative search wordings. I guess that is essentially how you found it too.  It must be a recent notice because I wouldn't have need to search on how forwarding works since I too have been forwarding to another non-att account for some time and accessing it through my Thunderbird client.

If you don't use the att email address then I assume you are using another email service.  Does that service allow you to link accounts, i.e., have your account on that service act as a POP client to att and pull the att email instead of pushing (forwarding) to the account you are using?  If forwarding does go away then that's the only alternative.  That or having to log on to the att webmail (which you need to occasionally do anyhow just to check for false positives in the spam box).

I recently experimented linking the accounts with my email service instead of forwarding.  It works...sometimes.  Apparently the att/yahoo servers are slower than my email service expects and I randomly get timeout errors.  It's got to be that reason because I have linked accounts to google and another service and they never time out.  Go figure.

"If you don't use the att email address then I assume you are using another email service.  Does that service allow you to link accounts"

This is starting to veer away from the original topic, but since I see no mechanism for a private reply, here is the brief answer.

Yes, I actually use a number of email services.  I choose to have them all forward to one, which I access from thunderbird.  With multiple email systems, one can either pull (POP/IMAP) or push (forward) between them.  Right or wrong, I feel pushing makes more sense, especially for lesser used services (interaction only occurs  when an email arrives rather than having to constantly poll and it is much simpler to configure -- K.I.S.S.).  When/if ATT forwarding disappears I will need to decide if a just will ignore anything going to att.net or do I want to add complexity to my thunderbird configuration to poll att.net.  I suspect I will do the former.  (Can I even trust that ATT will continue to support POP, given their decision to turn off forwarding.)

Just adding additional accounts to an email client, particularly TB, I don't see as added complexity.  Using them you don't even have to link accounts like I previously described.  In my case doing the linking was basically "playing" around with my new'ish email service (switched about 6 months ago).  But I do have an additional accounts set up in my TB.  Actually it's my new'ish service which is my newly added account since I originally had the att account set up for years in my TB.  In my case I was using the forwarding only to my new service account more-or-less just to fool around and as a possible backup channel.  Just keeping the att account set up at all is mainly just an academic exercise for me anyhow since no one knows my att email address and thus I never get any email there.  It's a just-in-case att ignores my contact email address and happens to send something to the actual att.net address (i.e., they use my login id instead of my contact info).  It's never happened ever so far.

As for sending private messages, click the avatar in the top left of a post.  That will take you to the poster's forum profile page.  On the top right of that page you will see a "Send a message" button.  With that you send a private message (PM) to that forum member.

see ATT link here on their notice of eliminating forwarding:  https://www.att.com/esupport/article.html#!/email-support/KM1040862?gsi=lGOjh6YP

What's not clear is does this also apply to secondary accounts under the primary ATT email account or other companies like gmail, etc.