Loss of Email - F010762348

For what it’s worth, I do believe we may have two or more separate issues going on here.

Firstly, a (large) number of users reported, starting back on late Saturday, that they were unable to connect to their VM mailbox or send or receive emails.

After a couple of days, it would appear that VM managed to re-enable the ability of most, if not all of these people to be able to send and receive new emails, but all old, historic messages suddenly went missing.

There are a number of customers who are reporting that they still can’t connect to their mailboxes and hence send or receive email, but their old historic messages are still there.

However, if you look back through this forum, you will see reports from people claiming that their connection hadn’t worked before Saturday, and this could be due to a number of issues, not being a current VM subscriber and VM have finally gotten around to closing your mailbox; VM have a policy of locking mailboxes which they think have become compromised in some way, and the fix is to change password etc.

The problem is that when you have a set of potentially overlapping issues, trying to fix one can compound the problem and you end up in a worse state.

Now the latest missive from VM’s marketing / damage limitation department, claims that anyone affected by whatever the hell happened on Saturday, has been fixed and you should all be able to send and receive new message, old historic ones is still completely up in the air, but still! Let’s be fair and assume this is the case, the first thing you need to do is to try accessing your email via a web browser on https://mail2.virginmedia.com

Log in with your current email address and password, does this work? If no, and it throws up an issue along the lines of ‘your account is temporarily unavailable’ etc, then you might want to now try changing the password and trying again. If still no luck, then I’m afraid you need to wait for VM to sort the issue out or not, there really isn’t much more you can do! On the other hand, if it works, then good, your mailbox is intact, try sending a test message and relying to it. Does that work? If yes, then also good, can you see all of your old historic messages? If yes, then give thanks to whichever God you believe in as you may well have gotten away with it. Then try accessing the mail with an app on your phone / tablet / PC etc. If this doesn’t work, then it is likely that you have changed your password, and this new one will work for webmail, but for access through an app or program, you need to create a new ‘app specific password’ purely for this!*.

Lastly, I am the least likely person to subscribe to ‘conspiracy theories’, but, for the past month or so, there does seem to have been a detectable uptick in posts on here claiming that their VM email address has been ‘hacked’ and suggesting that VM themselves have been hacked and that they have lost a load of customer data. Ninety-nine times out of a hundred, this is just rubbish, there are far more plausible explanations, re-using passwords on different sites etc, the fact that VM don’t (and be honest, never will now) use 2FA for email access. But, this uptick in reports, plus what has happened recently, does make you wonder. Of course, if they had been hacked by some external agent and customer data had been exfilated, and they had failed to report this to the ICO, then they are looking at fines of potentially company-terminating levels, and I’m sure they wouldn’t be that daft!

Anyhow, just random, personal thought and speculations, what would I know?

* Instructions for doing this are around on various threads as posted by VIP members, oddly enough these VIP forum members do seem all to be strangely absent from this thread, giving any advice or insight into an issue which is, naturally causing concern to a number of VM customers, and in return for various ‘benefits’ are really supposed to step-up and be a first line of support, almost as if they have all been told to stay away, or maybe they all realise what a mess this all is and really don’t want to be involved?

Of course, entirely a matter of speculation, I’ll leave any poster on here to think about this themselves and draw their own conclusions!

Oh and sorry, forgot, one other thing. It does appear that a number of people who previous couldn’t send or receive email, now can, and that’s good.

What would be better though is a post from someone, just one would do, who claims that they had lost all of their historic emails but a day or so later, they all started to come back. That would, at least indicate that VM do have some kind of restoration procedure, and even if it doesn’t work for everyone, and some proportion of customers end up never getting their old messages back, there is at least a degree of hope.

Now there have been one or two cases of people reporting that their folder structure has reappeared, albeit there are no messages in the folders, which is a hopeful sign but not definitive.

Assuming that the VM message is true and that they are actually “working flat out….’ to restore messages, I would have expected by now, to have seen at least one or two posts reporting that this has happened, and everyone else needs to just be patient. The lack of said post, unless, I have just missed them, is somewhat concerning, no?

It's now 4 days since the 19th when we lost all our emails and folders not 2. Can we have a realistic timescale for restoration or a workaround before these emails get lost forever. I can not run my business without these older emails. 

Just been to W H Smiths and bought myself a writing pad and pen.................

Will we get to 100 pages?

ModTeam - RUBBISH!

It's FOUR DAYS NOW... I've been locked out of my blueyonder account - and now I'm locked out even getting onto email via VM! ... THIS IS NOT ACCEPTABLE.

Been on the line with private messages with a Forum Moderator, but he's gone dark after 23 minutes. 

Stop chatting nonsense... I still can't log into my ntlworld account to send and recieve emails... so how does that work 😂😂👌

All accounts ?. I don't think so. Still cannot send or receive on the Mrs account, Got my bill OK though, nice to have something that works for you.

If they can't restore all the old emails & folders, will they even admit it, and tell us what actually happened?

Or will they simply lock this thread, stop anymore discussion, and just hope everyone eventually just gives up and goes away?