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ajfhodgson's avatar
ajfhodgson
Tuning in
4 months ago
Solved

Another virgin.net Cancellation Victim

Hi,

I'm another victim of the unilateral cancellation disaster. Like many others, me and my wife got our @virgin.net email addresses in the 1p/minute dial-up ISP days of 1997.

Reading all the threads, it seems I'm actually fortunate to have got 30 days notice that my identity on the internet for the last 27 years will be summarily deleted.

I'm also fortunate that I set up forwarding/delete-from-server from @virgin.net to an gmail.com account back in 2008, so there isn't any email I need to download from their servers.

The main issue is that I've been using @virgin.net as my login and/or communication identity for many, many websites, including government gateway, utilities, banks, the council, pension providers, etc etc. The painful part is not informing human correspondents or organisations that my email is changing - that's just sending an email to them. It's changing the identity/contact email on 186 different websites, each of which has a different approach. Some, if you can log in, just let you change it, others send a verification email to the new address, some to the old address, some cannot do it online, you need to talk to customer service. It's a time-consuming nightmare!

I've currently spent over 12 hours working through this, and am about halfway through.

Which brings me to my three questions for you knowledgeable people:

1. I acknowledge that Virgin is getting no revenue from the service it's offering me, But many places (Google, Yahoo, etc) offer email for free - the cost is negligible. If Virgin Media is doing this to save that negligible cost, could they not have offered a paid service, a buy-out? I for one would have been happy to pay £100 for life-time service, even just to avoid the 12 hours spent so far and at least 12 more to come.

2. I have to help an elderly friend who has NOT been forwarding mail to gmail who is facing the same thing. What is the best way to get a csv file download of all email addresses that have sent him email - to make a list to pivot table and work through? Does @virgin.net still support IMAP access, so Thunderbird can suck out all the email (I understand it can generate a csv file)? Does Virgin offer any kind of 'take-out' feature?

3. I got on livechat with Virgin Media support when I first got the email, and having fought through the chatbot "Terri BOT", and then through first line support "Gwyneth Chloe" who didn't understand the question as said "Based on I can see here on your account, we cannot be able to access since it is already disconnected.", I finally got through to second-line team "dedicated team to help you regarding on this matter" member "Sneha" and then got the following reassurance: [MOD EDIT: PERSONAL INFORMATION REMOVED]

Question 3 - are we absolutely, positively sure that Sneha is talking nonsense, i.e. sure that the virgin.net accounts will be deleted when 30 days are up (and I'm not wasting my entire weekend)?

Many thanks, sorry for the long message and multiple questions, but I'm quite worked up about this!

 

[MOD EDIT: Personal and private information has been removed from this post. Please do not post personal or private information in your public posts. Please review the Forum Guidelines]

 

  • Graham_A's avatar
    Graham_A
    4 months ago

    ajfhodgson You will need to generate an app password for the virgin.net account.  You do this via the My Virgin Media account for the email address concerned so if you don't have access to that it could be problematic.  Have you responded to the PM from Daniel_Et