Re: Another virgin.net Cancellation Victim
I am in exactly the same position. Had the identity of my virgin.net for nigh on 30 and have also, for years, had autoforward set up to a Hotmail account as a precaution. Spoke to customer services today and they basically said, your email address is toast, please find someone else to complain to about how this will unavoidably make you ill with stress and ruin your life.
The only thing I can think to do is make an almighty noise begging for a change of heart; petition, march on Whitehall...?
A VIP or moderator has placed your last post here, onto your own topic, taken from a post elsewhere on a different topic. You would do best to keep your posts to your own topic here to avoid them getting missed by the VM forum team if tagged on elsewhere. A VM forum team person should reply here within a few days.
A couple of people have asked on here about taking out a VM broadband package to try to move a virgin.net email address to it. See my reply on a different topic as to why, IMHO, this could well turn out to be a waste of time/effort/money for the customer
VM seems pretty determined to close down the remaining legacy virgin.net mailboxes and, in all likelihood, your virgin.net mailbox is going to be closed at the end of the 30 day window if you are not currently a VM broadband customer. VM's previous approach was just to delete the mailbox without warning so the 30 days does at least give some window of opportunity to make the necessary changes.
As far as completing a salvage operation before that happens, the link above for Mailstore should help you rescue the contents of the mailbox (but note the need to use an app password to set that up as per below)
Once you have the mailbox backed up, you can start identifying contacts and services you need to move to a new third-party email address (Gmail or Outlook are the obvious choices but there are others too).
You may be able to export contacts from the VM mailbox as below (I no longer have VM email to check if this feature is actually available)
When I moved away from VM email around 2010, I began by viewing the inbox and folders for the last year and sorted them by sender name. That gave me a list of recent names/services that needed to be updated. I chose to start with the most important ones such as banking, utilities, medical, insurance, main online shopping sites etc. etc. working my way through to the least important ones. You could also prioritise any that you know required the email address for 2FA.
It's a bit of tedious process but I think I only encountered one financial website where I couldn't make the change online and had to go to a branch to change details.
Doing a certain number each day, the task was completed in a reasonable timeframe after sticking at it.
Hope you manage to resolve the issue one way or another.