Locked out of email
I normally use outlook 2016 on my desktop, and apple mail on my iphone, to access my virgin.net emails. I also use the web client via My Virgin Media when I am away from home.
Last Friday I sent an email from outlook which seems to have been sent successfully but the subsequent get for new emails failed with an error message. I tried the web client but was told my Virgin Media account was currently unavailable because the account was locked. I followed the steps to unlock the account having first signed in to My Virgin Media. Before I could change the password I was prompted to set a new email address for use as my login id by My Virgin Media. I entered my Hotmail email address as prompted and then waited for the promised email to arrive, which it did an hour later. When I followed the link it told me that the link had expired. I went back to My Virgin Media and tried again but this time with a gmail account I had set up especially. This time I received the ‘verify your email address’ email and clicked on the link. I received a subsequent message in gmail with a verification code which I entered and finally received a success message.
Then I was prompted to log off and sign back in but this I could not do. No email and password combination would work. I tried the ‘forgot password’ option to do a reset and entered my new gmail address but received the unhelpful Ooops something went wrong message with a please try again later. I get the same result every time I try.
I spoke to customer support on 0345 454 1111 and was passed from pillar to post with no-one able to help because I do not have any VM products. The problem is that I have never been a Virgin Media customer. I am a legacy virgin.net customer from the days of modems and dialup and have made constant use of my virgin.net email account for the past 30 odd years. I do have an account number for My virgin Media along with the Area Reference but the support people I have spoken to cannot access it and can’t help. I was eventually passed to someone in the Telecoms team who said that they could indeed see that I have an active account but couldn’t do anything to help. However, they promised to raise a ticket on my behalf. I gave my mobile number as a contact but have not received a ticket number and as I can’t log in I can’t see if there is a ticket active against my account.
I use my virgin.net email for everything. It is a huge job for me to now switch everything to a new email address with another provider and I am now getting highly stressed. I guess I may have to consider a move because from what I have seen on the forum, support for virgin.net may be removed completely although I have not received any notification of this from Virgin.
I still need to get hold of all my recent emails and set up a forward to my gmail address for any further emails that get sent to me. Can anyone suggest an approach please? The phone number I was given seems to go to a 3rd party who acts for VM. Does anyone know if there is a way to contact the teams that look after the email side of things? There must be a way that I can get in to my emails without having VM broadband and I am sure there will be others in the same position as me.