I am reading through these community posts having recently joined. I have been using VirginMedia (email only) for decades without issue .. until recently when like you I lost one important secondary email account (although I retain archives of messages in ThunderBird profiles to recover). Like your important case awaiting exam results my secondary account was linked to important sources. I had to rapidly marshall my thoughts to skirt around the issue by forwarding to different email addresses such as GMail. The loss of secondary issue remains unexplained and I do not expect from reading this forum that VM will solve it.
This was a wakeup call for me .. opening a Pandora's box .. and I realise how vulnerable and locked is the community of VM users. Over the years (even decades in my case) we pay dearly for the rental of “virginmedia.com” (and in my case also older “ntlworld.com”) addresses and we pay for the rental of Hub and Router (all owned by VirginMedia as a lockin strategy). But we find it difficult to migrate away (cut the shackles) when an emergency occurs.
I have decided to take note and reengineer my mail management strategy but gradually over a period of months keeping VM account alive while trialling in parallel. In other words dual services. I only use VM (and ntlworld) email and I do not have a mobile account so I have perhaps narrower requirements than most. But the email content runs deep.
So one immediate nugget of advice, advise your son who is embarking on education career path to create a free (parallel) Proton Mail account. This can run separately from your established VM acounts. Over time you can learn how to migrate legacy profiles from VM to Proton - but that is a major step and is optional. It will require technical advice. I plan to create a link to a journal I am writing to advise my own family members.
The aim is - over time - to take control of your email channels. Later my plan is to use my own registered domain so I can use my own address(es).
https://protonmail.uservoice.com/forums/935538-accounts-payments/suggestions/32275693-free-education-account-plus-plan
