Often what happens is that when a customer leaves VM, after 90 days or so the ‘user account’ associated with the mailbox gets deleted. In theory this should, also trigger a deletion of the mailbox and email address itself, but this doesn’t always happen. In this case the mailbox will still accept email addressed to it (so it appears to be ‘live’), if you set up any email forwarders, then these will still work and send email to another address, as they are a feature of the mailbox.
The problem is that without a related user account then the mailbox is effectively orphaned out and can’t be accessed, sometimes the account has simply been disabled in preparation for deletion and in this case then, yes, sometimes it can be reactivated on a temporary basis.
But if the account has been deleted, then I’m afraid it is game over, VM won’t create a new account for you (and, be fair, you are not a customer, nor paying them, so why would they?), and without an account with the appropriate permissions for that mailbox, then it simply isn’t accessible.
At the very best, a member of the VM team, when they get to this thread, will offer to contact you by personal message to get further details and do what they can to expedite the full deletion of the mailbox.
