Ntlworld email addresses and the mess that is the new login system

[dhaller]

Hi,

My 84 year old father has been an Ntlworld customer for ~20 years, and he and my mother both still use @ntlworld.com email addresses. A recent mandatory change has come into place which requires a non-virgin account to be the log in. This process, and the edge cases surrounding it have caused my Father to lose access to his email for over 3 months, and spend literally days on the phone to customer support. The cycle is this:

- I help my father follow the steps in the guidance sent with the changes

- I bump into an unsupported edge case that hasn't been accounted for, and am forced to go through support

- Support follows a script which also doesn't account for the edge case, so they put in a ticket and promise to call back

- Either the ticket is never responded to, or support calls my father, who by now (3 months of phone calls) is absolutely in a muddle with all the accounts, passwords, etc.

- I restart the process, get blocked, get fobbed off by a ticket etc.

The latest development is that after a phonecall with a hostile support person, the situation has got even worse and now my mother is locked out of her email too. They are both totally worn down by spending hours on the phone just to get their email working again, which worked absolutely fine until Virgin meddled with their conglomerate of legacy companies.

I am looking for a way to have continuity with the support process, so that I can finally resolve this situation on their behalf without going in circles. How can I get in contact with someone that isn't following a script, and who will phone or email me instead of confusing my elderly parents further?

[Graham_A]

@dhaller It would help if you could explain what you mean by "bump into an unsupported edge case that hasn't been accounted for"?

Also can you confirm that your parents email addresses are attached to a Virgin Media broadband account that has been in continuous use since the email addresses were created.

How do they normally access their emails, via the VM webmail page or via an email client such as Thunderbird?

This information will help other community users and the VM Forum Team staff to understand the issue concerned.

For the VM Forum Team staff to assist via the Community they would need your father to create a community account in order to be able to go through account security with him.

[dhaller]

Thanks Graham,

Yeah, I appreciate that was vague. It's been 6 weeks or so since I last tried to help so I can't remember all of the specifics.I can try and get the ticket numbers from them if that would be helpful. One situation that happened was the support person changed the login email to the ntlworld account (I didn't ask for this). When this happens, a confirmation email is sent to the account, but of course because they are locked out of the account, that link cannot be clicked. You then cannot change the login email to something else because the system gets locked in an "awaiting email confirmation" step.

I thought I could get around this by using the webmail client: you don't need the email account password to login into the default email address, you can just use the account login password. So in theory, I could log into the account login, and click the confirmation through webmail. Unfortunately the default email account is not my father's email, it's _my_ old email that I haven't used for years. When I asked support to remove my email and set my father's email as the default webmail client, that was a ticket too.

 The [ntlworld] email addresses are attached to a Virgin Media account. The Virgin media account was updated with a new @msn.com login, but the password for the @ntlworld.com email address could not be recovered. One email address is used with Outlook, and one is used with the Samsung android phone email app.

[Graham_A]

With the change of log in username to a third party email address the verification email is sent to the third party email address not the Ntlworld email address.

Each VM/Ntlworld/blueyonder email address now potentially has two separate username/password combinations attached to it.

The third party email address is used as the username to sign into the relevant My Virgin Media account and VM webmail with the account password.

Email client access uses the relevant Ntlworld email address as the username together with a generated app password which is created through the My Virgin Media account for the relevant email address. 

Each VM email address has its own My Virgin Media account.

[dhaller]

> the verification email is sent to the third party email address not the Ntlworld email address.

Yeah, I understand this, but there was definitely a situation where I had to click something in the email that could not be accessed. If I recall, the login email was changed by an agent back to the ntlworld email (after already changing it to a third party email).

> Each VM/Ntlworld/blueyonder email address now potentially has two separate username/password combinations attached to it.

This is really useful to know, because when my father signs in via his new third party login, he sees my old webmail, not his. That suggests that the other two emails need to go through the third party linking process..? Ideally my email would be eliminated entirely, but it appears to be linked to the billing account

> Email client access uses the relevant Ntlworld email address as the username together with a generated app password which is created through the My Virgin Media account for the relevant email address. 

Ah yes, it was generating the new app password that was causing problems, but I can't remember why now. I'm going to have to start the process again and see where I get stuck and come back here

[dhaller]

Alright, so I've got home from work and refamiliarised myself. 

Account situation: there are three email addresses somewhere in the system. dad@ntlworld.com, mum@ntlworld.com, me@ntlworld.com

The third party login changed was received by dad by letter. my email address is abandoned. mum email address is in use sometimes, not sure if a third party email reminder was received. Dad/i followed the steps in the letter. Billholder account now has thirdparty login.

Objective is to regain access to dad@ntlworld.com in outlook. Problem is password is long forgotten. So, tonight:

- third party login password was forgotten. I recovered in through forgot password via third party email account

- I logged in as thirdparty login

- I went to mail settings to generate a new password, but the email address here is me@ntlworld.com. [this is where I previously asked support to change it to dad@ntlworld.com but they changed the login instead]

With the new knowledge that each email is now considered a separate account, I have tried to log in to my virgin media as me@ntlworld.com and mum@ntlworld.com. The passwords for both of these accounts are not working and/or lost. Doing forget password on either says "Please ensure you provide the email address you use to sign in to My Virgin Media.", which presumably hasn't been set for these accounts yet.

I then tried to see if I could administrate the secondary email accounts from the primary account. On this page it says:

> Want to delete a secondary email account? Sign in to the primary account at My Virgin Media, head to Account Settings and then Account Details. You’ll see a list of secondary accounts and the option to delete them.

There are no ntlworld accounts on this page

Thanks

[Graham_A]

@dhaller If the sign in usernames have been changed to third party email addresses then these will show up as the secondary accounts via the primary My Virgin Media account.

If the Ntlworld email addresses concerned haven't been updated to a third party email username and are not showing up as secondary accounts then that is a concern.

It comes back to the earlier question about whether they are linked to the original virgin media broadband account under which they were set up?

I think that the VM Forum Team staff will need to pick this one up, but they will need the primary account holder to clear security with them in order to help.

[dhaller]

Thanks for the reply.

Only the billholder account has been updated to a third party username which appears to be me@ntlworld.com (not sure why that's the case, but it is)

All email addresses were originally created from the primary ntlworld.com account 20 years ago i.e. there have never been multiple billing accounts or anything like that. I don't know how that has translated to virgin media accounts over time.

[Gareth_L]

Hello dhaller.

Thanks for your first post and welcome to our Community.
Sorry to hear you are having an issue with parents email address
I'd like to take a look into this for you.
If you don't mind, I will need to send you a private message to pass security. 
If you can check your logo at the  top right of your screen that would be great. 
Regards     
Gareth_L
 

[Gareth_L]

Hi Dan. 

Sorry for the delay, we work different shifts, So we are unable to reply asap.

I have located your Dads email address and just need to speak with our second line support team.

As soon as I have an update I will send you a message back.

Gareth_L