Hi Karengardener 👋 welcome to the community forum! Thank you for posting.
Sorry to hear about these issues with your email.
I'm sorry to say the community have advised you correctly. Sadly if the email address is not linked to an active broadband account it is 'orphaned' and so can be deleted at any time without notice.
We can ensure that the account is locked and deleted for you, but we would not be able to support regaining access.
You need the email address to be linked to an active services account, and an active My VM account in order to manage it's use with 3rd party mail apps, including generating secure passwords for these. There's sadly no way around this without an active account. As mentioned above it is outlined in our Terms and Conditions and you can also find this outlined further in our help page for manage emails here 👉 How to manage my email account | Virgin Media Help .
Let us know if you would like us to contact cyber security to ensure the mailbox is locked and deleted for you, and we will send you a PM to confirm a few details.
Wishing you all the best. 🌞