Account Sign-In Changes
This morning I received the email below. Reading this are we going back to the old way of signing into our accounts?
Forum Discussion
36 Replies
Hi Virgin Media,
Like others here I received the email telling me I would need to change back to a Virgin email address from the 30th of June, and was expecting some disruption this week, but nothing yet. Today I was with a friend who also uses Virgin Media and I mentioned the above change and he looked at me blankly. I reminded him of the huge hassle we all went through last year having to find a 3rd party email address and follow the confusing instructions to generate a new App Password, but he said he never had to do that. So I concluded that last years change to use non Virgin email was clearly not applied to every customer. Trying to understand why lead me to assume that some of us customers must have been using some email server(s) that required this change, and other customers were using other servers that did not need the change. It can't be related to the email domain, as my ntlworld.com addresses, and virginmedia.com address were impacted, but his ntlworld.com address was not.
I am sure last year we were told the change was required to improve security, which I thought was a joke. How could using a 3rd party email domain be more secure than using a domain owned by Virgin? I did wonder if VM had a security issue and couldn't trust its own domains anymore.
Now in this thread Kath_P has said this change helps to "keep our online spaces safe and secure.", which is the opposite of the line we were fed last year.
So come on Virgin, how about you tell us the truth for once? Did you have a problem with a number of VM customers, and the work-around was to make us use 3rd party email? Have you now resolved that problem and we can move back to the way it used to work?
Don't treat us like idiots and try and feed us a pack of lies, some of us work in IT and can recognise bullsh*t when we hear it. I would hope it was just a technical failure, and not something worse that should make us worried about the security and integrity of our email accounts?
So come on Virgin, how about you tell us the truth for once?
Highly unlikely the true reason for all this VM 'confusion' will ever enter the public domain.
AIUI, the requirement to change to a third-party email address was genuinely related to security.
In the previous arrangement, the primary mailbox and password was also the login for My VM. And from within My VM the account holder could reset passwords for secondary accounts.
Many customers have reused the same email/password combo across many sites and services so, when their favourite email/password combo happened to get leaked in some data breach somewhere, scammers need simply have looked at the email address and realise that they had a good chance of accessing a My VM account and thereafter a having the ability to reset the passwords of all the secondary mailboxes for that VM account.
Making a third party email address into the username broke the link between the My VM account and the primary mailbox and giving secondary mailboxes their own My VM login provided further damage limitation protection.
In many topics on here it became clear that scammers were accessing mailboxes using some sort of email software so the email app password (which had to be created in My VM) went some way in dealing with that issue.
There was a period of time on here where there were regular topics complaining about scammer takeovers of mailboxes (and often mailboxes that were supposed to have been deleted a long time ago)
All of the above was a sicking plaster fix to a system that came about from lots of previous systems of previous companies.
AFAIK, the security requirements for a third party email address are triggered when the customer makes a change of some kind such as accessing email through a new device or setting up a new piece of email software.
One can only assume the some part of the hideous mashup of measures above has somehow broken for some users and so VM is having to go back to the original login arrangements.
The question of why this roll back has happened had not been answered the last time I read through the whole of this topic. I would be highly doubtful that a true explanation from VM will ever be forthcoming.
The obvious solution for any VM Mail users caught up in this mess is to stop using VM Mail and switch to an organisation which is capable of running a reliable email service.
