Resolved
Hi,
We are aware that some customers are experiencing issues with their email service and are very sorry for the inconvenience this is causing. Our teams are working flat out to fully restore all emails as soon as possible.
ModTeam
Update 13/07/23 - This has now been resolved. If you are still having issues, please make your own separate post giving as much detail as possible.
Like many here I am waiting for my historic EMails to be restored. I read that someone had had 56k EMails reastored going back I think it was ten years? What I want to do is to warn any users of old Outlook 2013(?) etc software where there is a maximum number of EMails/Data that these can hold. I had an incident about 10/15 years ago where I was being continually sent batches of hundreds of previously received EMails, generated by the VM server. It was a race - me deleting and more being received. VM could not see any reason why they should be sent as everything looked ok. In the end I was flooded and Outlook stopped working resulting in a rebuild from older backups, this time using Outlook 2016. I still lost a lot of the folders and EMails within them which was a pain I used the EMail folders to store historic correspondence for several elderley relatives for reference. Good luck everyone!
Just for your information despite losing all the archives my current file is complete (apart from some messages this week) and goes back 6 years. I have no idea how the automated VM archiving system works. I assumed that it hived of the files every calendar year. I am sure that I cannot be the only lucky one (touch wood).
This really is a shambles. You have managed to lose all my historic emails and virginmedia seem no closer to fixing the problem..I have had to spend the last 4 days updating my primary email address to a different company. Virginmedia customer services have never been that good and I am afraid, after being a customer for 12 years, I will be leaving them when my contract is up in September. Vastly overpriced these days, unstable broadband and TV, and first line support that is no use whatsoever. It’s as if Virginmedia want to lose customers. A pathetic service and they can give no clear indication when we will get back what we are paying enormous amounts of money for.
When I finally spoke to a real person (see my earlier post), one of the points made by the agent was that virgin email is not a subscription service: ie that it is not part of your contract. Like you I thought this was not the case but he informed me that anyone can open a virgin media email account even if they are not a virgin media customer. So there is a piece of info I didn’t know… and probably most of of the original subscribers (blueyonder, ntworld etc) didn’t know about as back in the day it WAS part of your contract.
anyway, just thought I’d add that extra bit, even though it doesn’t help solve any of the issues!!!
Yes the guy I spoke to sort of implied that since the service was 'free' tech support was low priority. I guess I had assumed it was part of my broadband payment but at least am aware it is not now. I just PRAY I can get my old emails back and then start to move the important ones away from virgin email.
Is anyone else getting 'Forbidden'?
My e mails disappeared last Monday 19 and you restored them the day after. This was a widespread problem. Now everything in any mailbox before 19th has disappeared again but your status check says there is not a problem. Oh yes it is, please reply.
All of my email history, some of it very important (such as holiday bookings, upcoming theatre tickets etc. etc.) has disappeared from all devices (iPad, IPhone, PC - both in the mail app & via a browser). The earliest email is now the one from Monday (19th June) saying that there were problems (I had noticed).
When will these emails be restored? Will they return to the folders I had set up for them or will they just be in my inbox & need resorting through? Will there be any compensation for the massive inconvenience that's been caused?
Well here we are at 14.00 and still no response from Virgin about all the missing history emails despite being promised they would be fixed by 13.00 TODAY. Why provide a fictitious date and time.
In a way you are luckier than me. I've been asking for an ETA and never received a reply. Missing the ETA by an hour after 5 days of outage isn't so bad. If not corrected some time today then the ETA was obviously made up to appease the humble customers.
Hello everyone.
For those of you who can access your webmail, and would like to restore your IMAP folders (albeit they are still empty at this time!), please follow these instructions:
At least this gives a glimmer of hope! The folders are still there. They just need to populate them now!
Luckily, I was travelling back to the UK on Sunday, and was not connected to the IMAP servers at the time of the crash (and IMAP was subsequently removed), so I still have the OST file on my laptop and the Mail App on my iPhone with all my mail still available and intact. I'm happy to help others retrieve their OST files - if, similarly to me, they were not online when the IMAP servers were shutdown. There is a good chance all your emails will be in the OST file (on your laptop, IF you used Outlook).
Hope this helps somewhat. Just trying to keep spirits up here.
I have already started the migration across to Gmail. And I have also just bought my own domain, with email (backed up by Gmail) from Google Domains. I wish I had done this years ago. I was always dreading this day (when I would have to change my *****@virgin.net email address on hundreds of websites, Banks, Council, Airlines, etc, etc and with thousands of contacts. Having been with and had my Virgin.net email since December 1996, there is a hell of a lot to sort out now!
It does not help that me, my 2 sons and my wife all managed to get (and still have) firstname.lastname@virgin.net email addresses. This is simply impossible now from the likes of Gmail, Outlook, etc. Absolute pain!
Good luck everyone. Feel free to reach out, and if I can offer any advice or help, I most certainly will.
Cheers,
73LEE
Well I did have a man call me back and in fairness he did try quite hard. He ran through tests and changed password plus tried to get me to set up virgin email on my mobile without success. He thinks it is part of the outrage. He is going to phone back on Tuesday and has put information through to the tech team so they can call me. He was quite honest and said that anyone on 150 number would not be able to deal with this. No direct number for complaints/vulnerable customers though sadly. I still think the lack of communication is dreadful though and the misinformation given.
I still don't have full access to my email account and is becoming increasingly annoying, any indication on when this issue will be fully resolved.
Forum TeamHi mcwilliams,
We have now restored the ability to send and receive emails for all affected accounts. Our teams are continuing to work flat out to restore historic emails into the inboxes of a small proportion of accounts. We apologise for any inconvenience caused. ^GT
My email account came up for a few days on my PC - with no historic emails, But now it has gone down again. What is happening?
Nope , me neither. I can send and receive at last but absolutely every email I've ever received or sent from either of my accounts has disappeared. My contract is coming up for renewal and if this appalling piece of IT Project Management continues, BT will be gaining a new customer (I've been with Virgin for 20 odd years). Did they not carry out a Risk Assessment and put in place mitigation and roll back strategies before they tinkered? I'm an IT Project Manager and this breaks every rule in the book. It would make a superb 'How not to' case study for students. Whilst customers are responsible for their own data (Virgin just provide a 'Service') Virgin do have a Duty Of Care to their customers and their data which includes the safekeeping of and facilitation of access to said data. I, for one, will be seeking compensation - and I don't mean a few pounds.
I also still can't access my Virgin email account via the web. The last time I was able to do so was Monday morning. I don't know what has supposedly been "fixed", but it's clearly not been a success.
23/6/23 Just a suggestion.... I may be talking nonsense or complete bs here
Is there any way that Virgin can send us affected users the .pst or .ost email data files for our affected accounts. The technically minded might be able to extract all the relevant emails from this by importing the info into an email client such as Outlook or Thunderbird or Mailbird (???). It would kinda prove that Virgin hasn't lost all our emails forever.
I would be willing to have a go with a bit of hand holding.
PS I have managed to restore the folder tree....but no emails in any of them
I hope this will not affect the restoration - if it ever happens
To get your Folders: Go to Settings (top right of email screen) then select Emails then clicck on box that says "Change IMAP Subscriptions" and then after clicking every single folder and subfolder and sub sub folder (cos there is no 1 click solution) and clicking save, you will have your folder tree back (but no old emails in them - just occasional ghost info - number of emails and number of unread - if you hover over a folder which used to contain some unread mail).
