Loosing email after bereavement
Any help appreciated.
My Mum was widowed almost 2yrs ago. My Dad originally had set up the VM account and email so it was in his name. My Mum is still a VM customer and still uses the email. I realise there has been a change of user but the service has been continuous and at the same address.
Reading other threads it looks like there's no way around this.
Is there anyone we can speak to/contact who can help her keep the email address.
Mum is 78 and been in tears on and off all day as she is worried about loosing contact with friends and family who only have the VM email address but she might not have their details.
I hit things with a hammer for a living so I'm struggling to get my head round how far reaching the consequence are of loosing an email address.
You will get a reply from the VM forum team on here, usually within a few days. They will advise what is possible under your (mum's) difficult circumstances.
While waiting for that reply, you might want to consider some proactive measures in case the VM 'computer says no'.
You/your mum could log into the mailbox and sort the inbox by sender (so you can see a list of everyone who has emailed, sorted by name). You could then make some lists (personal, suppliers, online accounts etc. etc.) of who has been in touch over the last year (or recent years). That would give you a list of who needs contacting if the mailbox is lost.
Assuming your mum uses VM webmail, and not an email client, I haven't used VM email for a long time but I imagine there is a function to export contacts to a file for offline storage somewhere.
If you do need to change email address, you should make changes to online accounts while the old VM mailbox is still working (because often a security email has to go to the old email address before a supplier online will allow you to set a new email address).
There is also a past topic here
on archiving the contents of a mailbox.
However, you should maybe wait for a VM forum team reply here before going into that process.
VM has made a lot of complicated and confusing security changes to its email system recently and trying to run the backup process above may prompt those to kick into action if they do not exist on the mailbox already. That might only make the situation more confusing/worse so probably best to wait for a VM reply here before trying that.
Hope you can manage to get the matter sorted with some help from the VM forum team.
