Forum Discussion

syedislam's avatar
syedislam
Tuning in
3 months ago

Secondary ntlworld.com email account

Since yesterday, my secondary @ntlworld.com account has been locked out.

Have spoken to support who took a non-virginmedia domain to attached to account, but this failed. Unfortunately, no idea what the issue is and seems virgin media do not understand how critical email communication is. 

Have been going around in circles trying to resolve this issue. Searching through the forum, has been a common theme.

Any VM people here that can help?

 

  • coenoby's avatar
    coenoby
    Very Insightful Person

    syedislam wrote:

    Unfortunately, no idea what the issue is and seems virgin media do not understand how critical email communication is. 

    Any VM people here that can help?


    I'm not a member of  VM staff but I can offer some advice:

    1) Was the issue escalated to one of the VM technical teams and if so do you have the "ticket" (reference) number for your case?

    The thing is that if one of the VM technical teams are still working on the case then there is probably not a lot that the VM Forum Team (VM staff who support this forum) can do for you at the moment. You will need to wait until the technical team get back to you.

    2) If the issue did not get passed on to the next level in VM support then it would be worth your while explain exactly what you mean when you say the linking of your non VM email address to your VM email account "failed".

    For example, did your non VM email account, that will become your VM username, not receive the verification code that VM generated?  Or did you get the verification code but could not  enter it into your My Virgin Media Account? In the vast majority of cases the process of adding a new username to your VM account works fine but there are a lot of different scenarios where things can go wrong.

    If you can provide some more detail then you are likely to get some good advice from forum members.

    3) Finally, remember that VM stopped issuing email accounts 2 1/2 years ago and since then new VM customers do not get the option to have free VM email accounts.  The future of the VM email service is not clear, but it seems that VM do not see the provision of an email service as part of their business plans going forward,

    Therefore it would be wise to consider switching over to using your non VM email account and not relying on your VM email account going forward.

    Coenoby

     

  • Thanks coenoby. Appreciate the imput. Has been raised with support but not had no response so far.

    Email address been used for many many years hence not the easiest task to move off. But agree, looks like needs to be done at some stage.

    In the meantime need to regain again access somehow.

     

     

     

     

    • coenoby's avatar
      coenoby
      Very Insightful Person

      syedislam wrote:

      Has been raised with support but not had no response so far.


      Based on previous experience, if you have a ticket open with VM support then you need to continue to  chase them. They do take time to get back to you,

      One of the forum team will contact you via this thread but if the matter is already with one of the technical teams then the forum team are limited in what they can do,

      "not the easiest task to move off. But agree, looks like needs to be done at some stage."

      As you see, when things go wrong, VM's email technical support is not great, so I'd respectfully suggest perhaps it needs to be sooner rather than later 🙁

      Coenoby

    • Gareth_L's avatar
      Gareth_L
      Forum Team

      Hello syedislam.

      Thanks for your first post and welcome to our community.

      Sorry to hear your additional email account has been locked.

      Before we take a look from here, can we just ask if you've been able to access this since your last post?

      If not please let us know.

      Gareth_L

  • We had similar. I've been a customer originally of Diamond cable, then NTL, and at some point had virgin.net email addresses; can't remember the exact history but my wife and I now have ntlworld.com email addresses but the contract is with Virgin Media. In the past, as I recall, ISPs allowed you to have several email addresses to cover the household. It seems now that Virgin Media is trying to move to one email address per "account" or even none. Weirdly they seem to have begun requiring you to register with a non-Virgin (& non NTL) email address which rather subverts their business case. The only reason we, like several million people in the UK *, haven't left VM is because of the pain of changing email address. Ours are not only in people's electronic records but also in print (e.g. on "business" cards and pamphlets, even though we're not a business). 

    The other day we had a rather erratic  local email outage - something I later discovered from VM's service status. It resulted in an error message on my wife's email client (Thunderbird)  which suggested her email password was wrong so she re-entered her password, but it may have been an old one.  I know how to generate a new app password for my own email (as I'm the main account holder) but I couldn't find any way to change hers. I spent half a day yesterday on phone support with two VM reps (the second much better than the first). Eventually it is sorted - the second guy got me to set up a second gmail address for her and then a second VM account with it's own logon to the VM website and the ability to generate her own app password. I then took me the rest of the day to get them working again in her Thunderbird and phone and tablet and my Outlook and phone. 

    My impression is that the ability to have more than one email address for a single contract is a hangover from old contracts from previous companies VM have swallowed, but not doesn't naturally fit with their current customer model and website design.

    As we've both got gmail accounts now, I'm tempted to gradually migrate to using them so we can then in a year or so negotiate our VM contract from a position of strength. 

    * According to research by Uswitch, two million UK homes are holding back from switching broadband due to the fear of losing their email address.