Email account

Question

could someone please help both my partner and me regarding our Virgin.net email accounts. Last year I tried to access my emails and for some reason it wouldn't let me login. I called Virgin and they said it's because it's been taken over by a third party. I know my email address is still active because if I send an email to my virgin.net address I do not get an undeliverable message or email address not recognised. The very same thing has happened to my partner's virgin.net email address as well. We have had the accounts for over 30 years. We were told by Virgin that they do not maintain the Virgin.net email accounts anymore. Talk Talk have taken them over and shut all the Virgin.net accounts down. Are they legally allowed to do this to someone's private data without any notice, plus the emails are still going to a sever somewhere as people are telling us they have sent us emails and not received any undeliverable message or email account doesn't exist message. Can anyone at Virgin help both my partner and me with this awful stressful problem. By the way we do not have any Virgin media accounts. We have our phones with O2 and broadband with BT. We set up the Virgin.net email accounts over 30 years ago when emails were first being set up.

goslow · Answer

VM has been closing down mailboxes if they are not linked to a current VM broadband service. See

https://community.virginmedia.com/blog/Digital-life/some-important-information-if-you-have-a-virgin-media-email-account/5607207

Best you might hope for is to regain temporary access to rescue information and move to a third party email address.

Whether or not VM offers this seems to be a bit random. Usual reply seems to be they will not help.

You are unlikely to receive a reply from the VM forum team here in ‘Tech Chatter’. A VIP or moderator might move your topic to a better forum, such as ‘Email’ to get a VM reply.

jpeg1 · Answer

The reference to TalkTalk was entirely wrong. They have nothing to do with virgin.net emails, that domain is still owned by Virginmedia.&nbsp;

Krugernp1 · Answer

Thanks for letting me know re Talk Talk. The lady that told me that said she's been working for Virgin over 20 years. That's discouraging even if she can't get it right.

Krugernp1 · Answer

Thanks for coming back. My partner and I certainly didn't receive any notice on Virgin closing our virgin.net email. Had we done, we would have moved all our important emails to another email address. I doubt very much Virgin will give us temporary access to our virgin.net emails, although we know they are still active on a server somewhere as I've already said when emails are sent to the virgin.net ones the sender does not get 'a return to sender' 'unknown email address'. So our emails are going somewhere and we cannot understand why they haven't completely closed down our email addresses. As an example, my partner's accountant sent all his accounts, bank details, everything to his virgin.net Email address so someone or a server has access to these emails which they have blocked us from accessing. Thanks for replying&nbsp;

goslow · Answer

From reading many similar topics, it seems as if the first part of the mailbox deletion process involves putting the mailbox into a 'locked' condition. It still appears to receive emails but the mailbox owner cannot access the mailbox. In the second stage of deletion, the mailbox is removed entirely. From that point undeliverable messages are generated and the mailbox cannot be recovered.

VM's claims that it has contacted users before deletion are not reliable as many people have posted on here saying they never received any such notification. Without providing this notification, I don't believe it is fair, or reasonable, for VM to delete mailboxes which people have used for decades.

Unfortunately, VM does not behave in a reliable and consistent way towards those who have been affected by this. Some people posting on here have had an offer of help to see if the mailbox can be temporarily reactivated. Others have been told that nothing can be done.

What you do next will depend on your level of motivation, and need, to regain access to the mailbox.

One person dealt with the issue as below

https://community.virginmedia.com/discussions/email/email-account-closure-resolution-virgin-net/5589588

you will have to Google for the email addresses. They get removed if posted on here even though they are in the public domain. The one for the executive team is shown on the 'Accessibility' link at the bottom of the page using the 'Power of attorney ...' drop down.

In another topic the customer contacted the DPO

https://community.virginmedia.com/discussions/email/virgin-net-email-swindle-tell-bbc-rip-off-britain/5583100/replies/5586294#M281331

the post has since been moderated to say 'request a DSAR' but you should be requesting that temporary access is reinstated. The email address is in the privacy policy (again public info)

https://www.virginmedia.com/legal/privacy-policy

You could also raise the issue with the ICO and explain what has happened and seek further advice (unlikely to result in any useful outcome for you but they may take an interest if increasing numbers of people did this)

https://ico.org.uk/global/contact-us/contact-us-public/

Unfortunately, none of the above routes offer any guarantee of regaining access but you might want to try them depending on how badly you need to regain access. If you are locked out anyway, you have nothing to lose other than time/effort in trying.

If you have no need to regain access, you can request that VM permanently deletes the mailboxes. A VM person should reply here within a few days.

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