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andnjones's avatar
andnjones
Joining in
6 hours ago

Can't logon to Virgin Media Email on Laptop

On the 26th August we were thrown out of our Virgin Media (ntlworld) email on our laptop, prior to going abroad on holiday on 28th, after being forced to attempt to link our Virgin Media account and Virgin Media O2 ID. 

Five hours spent on chat and phone calls failed to resolve the issue!  The best we were able to achieve was that a ticket (which would take 3-5 days to be actioned) and a complaint (no. C-2608252163) were raised.  Taking 3-5 days to resolve access to an email account is totally unacceptable given the dependency on email for so many aspects of life; even without the added stress of the account holding all our travel confirmations.

Despite our nervousness about losing access to email on our phone, we have been able to limp along with this.  Customer service closed our complaint on 27th August with a supposed resolution.

Due to other priorities, we have not had the opportunity or time to try to attempt to access our Virgin Media account/email on our laptop until today and, surprise surprise, we still can't get on!!

Our Virgin Media (ntlworld) email is linked to a gmail account and, somewhere along the way, Virgin Media have linked it to a spurious gmail account, with a similar name to our own, but any attempt to link it to the correct one fails, even when specifying the correct email address for the validation email link to be sent to - it never arrives.  Round and round we go in circles.  So now we've been without access to our Virgin Media account and email on our laptop for three weeks. 

We have to say that all is good when the broadband, TV and phone service works.  However, the measure of a good company is how they deal with problems when things go wrong.  And, when things go wrong with Virgin Media, customer service is absolutely shocking!   

Surely it's not rocket science for a communications company to communicate with its customers to provide a prompt, accurate resolution to what is probably a very simple configuration error.

In the words of Pink Floyd - Is there anybody out there?

4 Replies

  • goslow's avatar
    goslow
    Alessandro Volta
    3 hours ago

    How are you trying to access email on the laptop?

    Are you using a web browser to access VM webmail?

    Or are you using an email app on the laptop such as Thunderbird, MS Outlook etc.?

    • andnjones's avatar
      andnjones
      Joining in
      48 minutes ago

      Hi, thank you for your reply.

      We access our VM email using webmail (https://mail.virginmedia.com/appsuite) and we tried accessing it via Firefox (which is kept up-to-date) and Microsoft edge.  We haven't tried accessing it via an app on the laptop (running Windows 11).

      However, I believe I've found the problem because, since posting this, I've managed to now access email using both Firefox and Microsoft Edge.

      We've discovered that dots don't matter in Gmail addresses:

      https://support.google.com/mail/answer/7436150?hl=en-GB

      and the spurious email address was exactly the same characters/numbers but with a dot in a different place.  I was presented with both my "normal" Gmail address and the "spurious" address.  By using the "spurious" Gmail address, I was then able to logon to our email.

      To me, this looks like a Virgin Media bug - Gmail doesn't care where the dot(s) is/are while VM does!  If VM look at this post, then they should be logging a potential bug with technical support.  Noone that my wife spoke to in VM customer service on 26th August was aware of this issue, which they should have been.  I'm sure many VM email customers use Gmail as a recovery email.

      Thanks again for your response.  N

      • Adduxi's avatar
        Adduxi
        Very Insightful Person
        39 minutes ago

        I don’t think the gmail dots are a bug, but a gmail “thing” that’s unique to gmail?