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.
Can anyone suggest where to move my Email provider to? I have a save of most of my VM Emails (*.pst files) except for late Sunday, Monday and some of Tuesday. I regularly back up my *.pst files, which contain all my Emails going back to the 1990s. OK, two days of EMails lost but I can ask my usual Email correspondents to re-send.
But which ISP to rely on? VM is an obvious "no-no", but this could equally happen elsewhere.
HenryQ wrote:But which ISP to rely on? VM is an obvious "no-no", but this could equally happen elsewhere.
Few ISP's issue email accounts these days and even if they did you are better off using a dedicated email provider.
There are lots out there, check these out for starters https://www.lifewire.com/best-free-email-accounts
Coenoby
HenryQ wrote:Can anyone suggest where to move my Email provider to? I have a save of most of my VM Emails (*.pst files) except for late Sunday, Monday and some of Tuesday. I regularly back up my *.pst files, which contain all my Emails going back to the 1990s. OK, two days of EMails lost but I can ask my usual Email correspondents to re-send.
But which ISP to rely on? VM is an obvious "no-no", but this could equally happen elsewhere.
I have switched to a icloud mail address
I recommend sticking with VM for the basic broadband provision. VM still do a decent job with that in my opinion. (Admittedly, I do recall an "all morning" outage in the past 6 months though, which was poor. Thankfully, it got no worse than that.)
For a dedicated email service, I recommend ditching VM, and going to a service like Proton Mail's "Mail Plus", which is about £41 per year at time of writing. That's the service I'm with now, as VM email services simply cannot be relied upon, and I often have critical emails to send/receive. (I can recall a series of VM email outages over the past year. This recent one is the worst, and may be the tipping-point for many customers.)
I use an email client (Outlook 2019) to manage all my email. Given I am with Proton Mail, I needed to install a little additional program called Proton Bridge, so my client can get email from Proton's servers.
Proton Mail uses IMAP. In addition to the IMAP folders, I manually copy/paste emails as they arrive -- or get sent -- into a back-up folder structure in Outlook, which I started back when I used POP3 email with VM. (I decided not to change over to IMAP with VM, and stuck with POP3.)
If Proton Mail had a disaster like VM, since it is IMAP, the folders and emails in the IMAP folders replicated in the client would also be lost. (This is because, with IMAP, any local client simply mirrors what is on the server.) However, since I also have manual backups on my local machine, inside a .pst file managed by my email client (placed into a folder structure as they arrive -- via [ctrl]+[c] and then [ctrl]+[v]), I have some extra piece of mind. In any case, it is extremely unlikely that Proton Mail will have an email disaster, as they know what they are doing, and are specialists in email.
I actually prefer the older POP3 email system, as it offers greater simplicity in many respects (as long as you are content to manage your email from a single computer only). However, most modern-day email providers favour IMAP. I searched high and low for a good paid-for POP3 email provider, but could not find one. The challenge, then, is getting IMAP to work for me in a way I find acceptable. I think I've managed to do that.
One final layer of resiliance is a back-up GMail address. I don't really use it, but it is there if I need it.
Hope some of that was informative.
My dad has lost ALL his emails and folders that had gas/electricity/lawer stuff on his Thunderbird client and even logging in via website it says he has 10 emails, nothing in bin and no folders but is using 285mb of data.
Is my dad ever going to get these folders and lost emails back?
Forum TeamHi alphaomega16
Welcome back to the community forums.
We apologise again to those individuals who have been experiencing issues with their email services since Monday. Our teams are continuing to work on restoring all users’ access as a priority and we will do this as soon as possible.
I was surprised to learn that your father lost everything downloaded to Thunderbird. I have my ntlworld emails forwarded to Thunderbird as I prefer using it. I have all these on my PC (and yes I am a sad person, I back them up to external hard disc). That has not been affected at all by loss of VM email system, except I may have not received a few email sent whilst it was down. I have now opened a gmail account and have arranged for that to download to Thudnerbird too.
And you have done exactly the right thing, far from being ‘sad’ you have taken responsibility for looking after your importent data, and having backups of it under your control - while virtually everyone else is missing out, you are fine, mostly, no?
I would like to think that this might make more people stop and think about the wisdom of allowing a third party over which they have little influence, to be entirely in control of and in possession of, their important information.
I’d like to think that, but I’m not that naïve.
I can now send and receive emails, but only those from 19th June onwards.
Is there any update on when the subfolders and old emails will be restored as I have years of important information including all my insurance and travel information that I really need to be able to access in the next couple of days.
email functionality gone for two days, restored, then folders disappear for 2 days.
asking the robots to find an agent for the nth time with all the info is painful, any sign of a fix or any support?
thats not exactly helpful, informative or encouraging. could you explain the precise nature of the disappeared data/folders, who exactly might fix it and possibly by when ?
Anyone else get the horrible feeling that all the old emails and folders will never be recovered now?
VM have not said a word about what's going on, both here and on social media, all they do is copy & paste the same meaningless message over and over again.
Their customer service has been absolutely disgusting over this whole mess, and they are simply dragging their feet, and hoping that if it goes on long enough everyone will just give up!
Don't worry, As VM keep telling us, "Our teams are working to resolve the problem as quickly as possible".
VM have posted this meaningless message umpteen times but continue to avoid defining their meaning of the adverb "quickly".
"Slowly" would be more accurate.
Honestly you could well be right regarding the permanent loss of all old emails. As I said on another post, it all critically depends on whether or not VM do indeed keep ‘snapshots’ of the mailbox system and they have a means of extracting useful data from them and restoring it to individual mailboxes. And this really isn’t a given, nor would it be a quick process to do.
The other thing I would also say, is that in slight defence of the VM forum team members on here, as you have rightly said, their only response is an identically worded, obviously copy and paste job. Now this has all the hallmarks of an edict from on high at VM towers, telling them that they are only to say this exact phrase, do not in the slightest deviate from this message - or else! Any criticism needs to be aimed squarely at VM’s senior management for this, not that we expect the company to be perfect and never have any technical issues - it’s the entire refusal to properly acknowledge it, to treat their customers with any degree of respect, be honest
Something along the lines of “OK look guys, xyz happened on Saturday and took out a while bunch of stuff, we think that can get it all back, but can’t guarantee it and it will take some time - we’ll give regular updates as to what progress we have made.....”, would, I think be far, far less damaging to the perception of the company than the current radio-silence.
However this head-burying and outright refusal to openly address issues such as this, have been a hallmark of VM’s modus operandi for some time, look at all the threads regarding installation failures and delays, where nobody appears to be able to find anything out, no information is forthcoming, many apologies are given - but nothing actually changes! So really don’t expect things to be different now!
Bottom line, don’t take it out on the forum team here and especially not on the poor souls running the call centres; they are possibly slightly behind the carpark attendant; in the pecking order as to who is informed about what is actually happening and being told meaningful information.
" don’t take it out on the forum team here and especially not on the poor souls running the call centres;"
Totally agree there.
Don't forget as well that the "VM" email servers are located in the Netherlands and registered to the Netherlands ISP Ziggo (now called "VodafoneZiggo") who like VM (or VM02) are part of the international cable and entertainment giant Liberty Global.
I have always understood that Ziggo runs and manages the "VM" email service rather than VM themselves.
From what I have seen on Dutch websites. it seems as if Ziggo email was also down in the Netherlands over the weekend but it seems to be ok now,
Coenoby
VM's customer 'service' is appalling at all times - all we ever ask is for a number to call when something goes wrong, and be able to talk to someone who
(a) has real power and knowledge to resolve the issue, and
(b) has English as their first language.
Instead, we're left in the dark, waiting for some kind of message to tell us what we already know. Well, VM, WE AIN'T GIVING UP ON THIS ONE! Restore our missing data, offer us all substantial compensation and a proper apology, and we MIGHT just consider not terminating our contracts with you.
My email went down a couple of days ago. When it reappeared I seem to have lost all of the emails that I had stored in separate folders and those that were in my sent box. Any help would be appreciated!
Forum TeamHello JulieB5
Thanks for posting in regards to the email access issues experienced.
We apologise again to those individuals who have been experiencing issues with their email services since Monday. Our teams are continuing to work on restoring all users’ access as a priority and we will do this as soon as possible.
Rob
I have lost all my previous emails from before this Monday this includes my personal emails and business email address via ntlworld.
Can you advise where they have gone and when I will be able to retrieve them please?
Forum TeamHi mbecks thanks for your post here in the Community although we're sorry to hear of the concerns you've raised here.
We apologise again to those individuals who have been experiencing issues with their email services since Monday. Our teams are continuing to work on restoring all users’ access as a priority and we will do this as soon as possible.
Many thanks
I still don’t have my emails and this is nearly a week on can someone please actually tell me what has happened rather than just the generic messages I see everywhere else.
These are my personal emails and I don’t have any apart from Tuesday this week onwards.
I would like 100% assurances that my emails have not been lost?!
I await an in-depth response on timescales and assurances please?!
Sorry, but these vague reassurances are simply not good enough. There are many of us who are being seriously inconvenienced - not to mention our contacts. It surely cannot take four days plus to find the missing emails. if they have been permanently lost, have the honesty to say so - and suggest what compensation we can expect for the many hours extra work this will entail.
So still no sign of the thousands of historical emails I used to have. And if VM don't retrieve them, what is my/our recourse? Can we expect compensation? How can we even know that everything is recovered, even if VM say it is? This whole situation needs to be resolved IMMEDIATELY.
In the event of VM not being able to restore your old messages, I’m afraid you legally have no recourse at all. If you look very carefully in the Ts and Cs of their service (which you actually agreed to when signing up), there is an explicit mention of they accept no liability for storage of emails and the onus is on you to make backups of anything important. Basically their lawyers will point to this and argue, ‘but you agreed to make your own backups, and failed to do so - well sorry about what you’ve lost, but tough'
Which all sounds very harsh and uncaring, but it is absolutely what will happen. Any compensation will probably be some token amount for the inconvenience and to show ‘how much VM value their customers, look we are offering £10 to each customer who can prove that they lost messages, even though we don’t legally have to’!
That's depressing - but I'm sure you're right.
A somewhat frank conversation with a clearly exasperated VM agent, who said when asked exactly what has caused this, "It might be attack on equipment, maybe some old equipment, and the engineers may be removing the malware."
Asked if will we get our emails / mailboxes back prior to this attack, "I can't say".
Asked how much longer this will take, "between 3 to 5 days, but that's an estimate, l can't give you an exact date for when it will be sorted."
I am most definitely moving following this abysmal and continuing failure.
hovercraft wrote:A somewhat frank conversation with a clearly exasperated VM agent, who said when asked exactly what has caused this, "It might be attack on equipment, maybe some old equipment, and the engineers may be removing the malware."
Asked if will we get our emails / mailboxes back prior to this attack, "I can't say".
Asked how much longer this will take, "between 3 to 5 days, but that's an estimate, l can't give you an exact date for when it will be sorted."I am most definitely moving following this abysmal and continuing failure.
And I can absolutely promise you that this was all something they made up or gossip overheard in the staff canteen. They simply won’t know, there will be lots of rumour floating around, exactly what went on and the realistic chances of recovery are probably only known by a handful of techies.
It might be attack on equipment, maybe some old equipment, malware? Well yes well done, it might; it might also be Act of God, prelude to an alien invasion, earthquake, Putin, etc.
They can’t say if you will ever get your emails back - good, at least that is honest, they simply don’t know, to be fair, I seriously doubt if ANYONE in VM knows for sure!
"3 to 5 days, but that’s an estimate", no that’s again something they made up or came from some overheard gossip.
But at least they said something, and not being sure if anyone will ever get their emails back is refreshingly honest, rather than the bland, corporate-speak, head-burying responses so far on here.
