Email dead from this morning

Hi, everyone.

Further to my posting above, I've just had a phone call this afternoon from a Virgin Media helpdesk person.  She had a grasp of the IT side of Virgin Media - I know, as I'm a programmer of nearly 40 years standing and have worked on help desks, support teams, DBAs and comms setups in my chequered career - and I ended up getting her to agree with me that the solutions her bosses at VM have come up with are less than perfect.

She says :

They don't give advice on 3rd party apps (Outlook, eM Client, Mailbird, Windows Mail) as they aren't VM software (fair enough) so now Pop3 and SMTP are starting to fail for all of us here on the community, they can't help us.

Their workround is to change our logins to the mail system to a 3rd party email account - so I would change my login to virginmedia.com from fred . smith @ virginmedia . com to fred . smith @ gmail . com, with new password, and any security issues with my virginmedia email account would be communicated to my gmail account.  Obviously, we all have email accounts with backup emails to other isps in case of a problem, but VM want us to change our primary login to the remail account, and the password, and (she actually said "touch wood" here !) this won't affect my access to my virginmedia emails (or to those of my wife, who has a different virginmedia email associated with our VM account too), and it "won't" affect access via android devices or apple ones.  They want us to do this because they can't make changes to our email accounts, not even by reorging their database to include a secondary e-mail field on the DB record.

How this makes my Pop3 995 port connect, I have no idea.

Oh, and the last thing : virginmedia email is only provided as a "complementary service" that we all seem to accidentally have.  We're only paying for the broadband and phone, she says, and the email service was thrown in for nothing.

This was when I asked :

If I stop paying and leave VM, then, my email will still work ?  No comment.

If I choose a 3rd party email as my VM login and the 3rd party account gets hacked, is that going to affect my virginmedia email security ?

If I had chosen demon.net as my 3rd party email, and it goes bust, can I access my VM emails at all ?

and...

If loads of virginmedia email users, with loads of different 3rd party apps all stop getting through to the VM servers via pop3 or smtp at the same time, how likely is it that all of the different users, apps and platforms all broke at the same time, rather than one central cause, like (say) a dip switch in the VM server room accidentally clicked by a duster when a cleaner came in ?  My example was : your lightbulb doesnt work.  You don't immediately call in 5 sets of electricians to check the wiring, or start moving electricity suppliers to fond one that makes the light come on... you check the bulb or the fuse first.

So they've tried to fob us off today with dubious workrounds, a 9.99 a month Gatget Team subscription, and adding an extra set of insecurity by involving other email addresses as primary logins.  In the meantime, how do I and my wife get paid if our payment accounts have virginmedia.com emails as primary contacts, or Paypal, or Tesco grocery delivery, or Gas and Electric, or hospital appointments, if virginmedia email stops working because their back end tech support people can't do their jobs properly ?

Eventually, she admitted that she wasn't happy with her bosses' solutions either, and we had a nice chat about the probable security and connectivity issues that may arise if their tech people aren't prepared to investigate, if they start lying about whether virginmedia email is a free service or something contractual that we're paying for, and what would happen if I change the family's login details and everything goes belly up.

I politely refused their offer of Gadget Support, sympathised with her that her bosses had given her such a flimsy script to read to us and fob us off, and suggested that if enough people lect VM because of this it might affect her own family's food on the table and her own mortgage of they have to "downsize" : maybe it's time to update her CV on the various sites...

Me ?  I'm not going to change anything, as most of it still works and I dont want to break anything by following their stupid instructions : but I'm going to start moving other family account logins off VM, and if it all stops working so that not even webmail works, I'll be off to Sky.  What a pity. Nearly 20 yers with them.

"At the root of every error that is blamed upon the computer, you will find two errors, including the initial error of blaming the first error on the computer"