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.
Further note: Today I received an email from Virgin which in essence said that they were no longer trying to give a date by which my older emails would be restored.
I haven't raised a complaint yet - I'm waiting a bit (?) longer to see just how bad the mess is (worst case, I think, will be to be told that years and years of emails, including ones I need NOW, have been totally lost due to sheer negligence on Virgin's part).
THEN I will start seriously compiling a list of the expensive "inconveniences" all this has caused me!!!
VM's only crime is not to have made it more clear in the small print that it is up to individual users to back up their own Emails. Users who didn't were always running a risk. VM suffered a technical crash and are still struggling to recover past Emails prior to 19th June.
Those who do have backups were annoyed at the Email outage, which lasted on and off for four days, but at least our Email backups were safe, It remains to be seen whether VM can recover what has been lost, but it doesn't look good at the present.
IMAP users who weren't backing up their Emails should start backing up what is left.
This incident and its continuing impact has proven a salutary lesson to many @HenryQ, but no small print relieves VM of its legal obligations to ensure User Data held on its servers are secure, and readily available – hence the reason they had to inform the ICO of this particular issue.
To directly quote the ICO on the Data Security aspect of UK GDPR governing organisations such as VM (comes under Article 32 - Security of Processing):
Unfortunately, a key element in this is the term: ‘timely manner’, which is imprecise and does not mandate a specific timescale. That is perhaps due to the potentially wide-ranging set of incidents, and their inherent complexities, that falls under this framework. I guess there has to be some flexibility owed to the impacted organisations, but I am surprised there is no insistence they provide an estimate of the timescale to complete the remedial action, within a set period of the incident occurring. As it currently stands, it is no better than simply mandating an: “As soon as possible”.
Despite this uncertainty wrt to timescales, I am still confident that the historical emails will be restored. We just don't know when... Hopefully we will have a better idea when Axel Wehrle provides his update 'early next week'.
Well, anyone who has tried to navigate the ICO website with regard to GDPR will need to set aside a few hours without a G&T to hand. Pretty unintelligible stuff.
I have implemented GDPR for a couple of charities but whether VM has broken GDPR in this case is, well at least for me, far from clear.
Think you'll find GDPR disagrees, and small print isn't going to help them. They've already reported themselves to the ICO I believe. Not something you do unless you've done something you shouldn't have?!
Yea, them going to the ICO was a odd move really. I personally think that the mail servers have been brute-forced to death with a lot of customer accounts hijacked. I mean, DDOS or BruteForcing has the same results we are seeing today - highly overloaded servers. It would be odd for them to go from enough capacity to not enough capacity overnight, and it shouldn't have been that difficult for them to work up a way to restore and migrate the old data back to the accounts (Freeze 1000 accounts, process, unfreeze, repeat) or even do it all while the server was down. It's really odd that they took the servers down to apply a fix and things got much much much worse. And now they mark the fault as fixed so you have to wonder whats going on. I have seen problems come up at VM and the Staff & Team assigned to fix it gets fired before it's actioned and then the next group says they never heard of those problems... This doesn't feel that way just yet but it is really odd..
Today (Sunday) I seem to be getting some, but not all, e-mails. This is, of course, almost worse than no e-mails at all. Come the working week we shall be wondering "Did X get my e-mail...have they replied?" and so forth. Any info from Virgin HQ as to when we might be back to 100% operation?
VM it's been 48hrs since your so-called maintenance and imap email is still down, i have tried removing and re-adding my email account to thunderbird but continuously get a "Unable to log in at server" error.
and no i do not have an old ntlworld account.
please fix this VM.
Virgin have made attempts for at least three nights running to fix this and other problems without success. I don't believe they know what to do to make things work properly - there's clearly a much deeper problem than they are admitting to. It is the failure to come clean and tell everyone how serious the problems are that annoys me the most.
If VM conducted regular scheduled overnight maintenance of their email systems it might not have gotten this bad.
As this is the 1st time they have ever sent out customer notifications about the email service maintenance (albeit at the last minute), it makes me think they have either never done it in the past or have done it previously but it was months or years prior.
the fact that they use the gmail backend, perhaps they could ask google for assistance.
I seeing time outs as my mail client attempts to connect to imap.virginmedia.com This is since the essential work overnight of the 29th June.
I am seeing such time outs about 50% of my attempts to connect.
Forum TeamHi oldbrad,
Thank you for your post. I'm very sorry for the issue you're having with your email address.
To confirm, are you able to log into your email address successfully?
^Martin
I can go online and login. I have had brief connection since the 30th June. The last message in my in box has 1st July 08.07 time stamp. I normally receive many messages per day.
Right now, Monday 3rd July 10:55 I am seeing continuous time outs.
Yes, I'm having the same. I've found shutting down and restarting Outlook helps but it is still really slow. I have an email in my outbox right now that doesn't want to be sent...
Is this still something being worked on?
Forum TeamHi Wozza123,
Thank you for your post. I'm very sorry you're also having this issue.
Can you please try resetting your email address password and try it again?
^Martin
By the by my email address is ..@ntlworld.com , which address I have had since before virgin media existed and which I intend to keep.
Forum TeamOkay, can you try resetting the password for me for the email and seeing if this continues?
^Martin
VM have zero interest in existing customers that have remained loyal because they rely on their email addresses. VM want to stop offering an email service because they see it as an unnecessary expense. VM are relying on keeping customers because it's a bit complicated to switch away from them. I need my historic emails for legal reasons and as soon as I can access and save them I'll switch to another provider. If I don't get my historic personal data back I'll take legal advice and join any class action against VM.
I will also be looking to migrating critical web, 2FA and other service accounts to another email service, probably Gmail.
Day 14 no historical emails - Like many others I foolishly trusted VM to keep my information safe and secure, and no I didn't back up or save or print my emails as I'm just an average non techy person who didn't think it was necessary. Naively, I've used the email folders to keep personal and important documentation a little like a home 'safe'....now its the third morning I've been awake since 4am worrying about these emails. There are emails relating to house moves, legal documents, financial institutions including my pension details and investments, will drafts, tax documents, rental contracts, coroners reports and personal sentimental final emails from my late father as well as holiday bookings, transfers and parking details, all containing references needed to access online viewing...... I REALLY NEED SOME REASSURANCE FROM VM THAT THESE EMAILS ARE SAFE AND RECOVERABLE as its starting to affect my health and well being. I don't care at this point about compensation, I'm just desperate for some reassurance. PLEASE VM TELL ME ITS GOING TO BE OK???????
You do not need to read a 218 page thread to know that VM is dysfunctional. When Axel started a couple of months ago he knew that VM was dysfunctional but you cannot see light at the end of the tunnel until you know what is inside that tunnel and deal with it, whether it be systems or personnel. That takes time. He will certainly have identified the lunacy of different messages from different sources and will now have channelled all outgoing communication on the historical archive problem to just one source ,himself.
That is why you can expect from him early next week a comprehensive explanation of the problem and the steps taken to fix it. He will identify and possibly over-exaggerate it. It is what new brooms usually do - the so-called 'big bath' approach. But he will certainly address it.
Hello,
I'm still having problems accessing my email. I get into the Inbox and choose a unread email to read, its still struggling to load the email. Message coming up saying unable to access server. Hopefully this outage is resolved soon.
Thanks.
I think another "update" is in order. Silly me chose this weekend to get a new phone on top of everything else, now I have 2 mobiles with various email issues, outlook on my pc with email issues, hell, I don't even have all emails coming into my virgin media mail box on my browser (pc). Tomorrow is Monday and I work away. I rely heavily on being able to receive and send emails. Come on Virgin, this is unacceptable.
I've al most completed migrating all my email folders and content (thankfully all held in emClient locally bar some attachments that seem to be syncing at present) to Gmail - then starts the mammoth task of unraveling 20 years of accounts that all link to my ntlworld email address! Thanks Virgin for making me realise that there is no logical reason to stay with you longer than I need to. You will lose my business (I don't think you care anyway about keeping existing customers anyway). SHAME ON YOU. I hope the ICO hauls you over the coals.
