The volume of SPAM that appears in my VM inbox leads me to believe that either VM don't have a functioning filter or the solution they use is next to useless.
Other mail services do not seem to suffer anywhere near as much but if i was part of the VM IT team I would be embarrassed by the number of messages coming through which any half decent filter should block.
Having many years in IT I can look after myself but it begs the question, does VM not care that more vulnerable / less savvy customers are being put at risk by having such poor SPAM filtering?
VM haven’t given new users a mailbox for over three years now. Leavers have the mailboxes purged after 90 days. Given normal user churn, the service is only going one way.
I get virtually no spam into my VM inbox. Roughly one or two emails are week are correctly identified as spam by the VM filters and appear in the SPAM box.
Have you checked your VM webmail settings to make sure that the Spam filters are set to move spam to the spam folder rather than the fourth option which is to Turn off all spam filtering?
I also regularly lots of messages in my inbox which are obvious spam (even to an idiot). So yes, whatever filters that Virgin use are completely useless
Meanwhile the SPAM continues to flow like a river of SPAM with VM using a paper bag to try and stop it.
I am lucky that my phone email client is much better at filtering this stuff so it isn't that difficult, just seems that VM don't care and are happy to keep putting more vulnerable people at risk.
Thanks for reaching out to us, sorry to hear of the issues that you are facing with spam mail entering your inbox. Have you checked out your spam settings, this link will be able to assist you 👉 Spam, should you still face issues after changing these settings and testing please come back to us where we can further investigate this.
My SPAM settings are all fine and I have created many rules to filter out junk that VM misses. I am a very long standing IT professional so know how to mange an inbox.
It seems that many of the current SPAM emails that come through are considered as newsletters so don't get picked up. Currently these are generally "you have won" emails pretending to be from UK businesses, "Storage Full" emails relating to non-existent Cloud Storage services, The Postcode lottery Advent Scam and "Heating Solutions".
I can't be the only person who hits the 'report SPAM' option but it feels like this is a waste of time as there is no improvement in the level of this email that comes through.
I thought that only comes up when VM identify an email as being a newsletter? But perhaps I'm wrong because I only use VM email for emails from VM such as this forum's notification emails.
If I remember correctly, VM introduced that "Newsletter detected" feature a long while ago. The idea was to allow VM email users to unsubscribe via VM rather than from an unsubscribe link in the email. Back then the "Report spam" option may have worked but I cannot say for sure.
The "Mark as spam" option I was referring to was the option under the "More actions" icon at the top of every email in the Inbox.
All I can say is that for a long time now VM's advice on how to handle spam emails has made no mention of any option to report spam so I am not at all surprised that you are not having any success with that "Report spam" option.
I am not being condescending when I say that I genuinely don't believe that VM provide any mechanism to allow users to train the VM spam filters. For that reason I suspect that the "Report spam" option on the newsletter screen simply moves the email to the spam folder.
As you are probably aware, the bigger picture with VM email is that:
VM stopped issuing new VM email accounts in early 2022. Since then new VM customers no longer have the option of having a VM email account.
Also, VM now has an active policy to close down any VM email account that is no longer linked to a paid for VM service. They do give you 90 days from when the BB account is closed.
As a result the number of VM email accounts is on a steady decline and it would seem that VM no longer sees the provision of an email service as part of their offering to the market going forward.
In recent times VM have made a lot of changes to the sign in and security of their accounts but who knows what the future holds for VM email?
