virgin.net email swindle: Tell BBC Rip Off Britain
For any other people affected by Virgin Media's decision to abruptly cut of virgin.net email access before they could do anything about it, please join me in submitting a complaint to the BBC programme "Rip Off Britain". If enough people complain we might just have sufficient leverage to get an adequate response from the high-handed Virgin Media staff responsible for robbing us of access to our previous emails and contact lists.
No doubt someone will tell me that I should have organised my twenty plus years of emails and contacts better but whoever made this decision should know that by and large, many the people affected are now relatively elderly and not as tech savvy as many younger folk, which meant that the time given between the email announcing the termination of the service and being denied access to their virgin.net email was only a few days and the means of achieving help from Virgin Media to find out what was happening and do something about it, so poor, was insufficient to enable us to rescue our existing emails and contact lists.
therevd wrote:I never got thirty days notice or anything close to it. <snip>
The first enquiries on here started about 3 weeks ago (the topic below was the first one I read on here)
Did you receive a notification within this timeframe and didn't act or was your notification much shorter? Was your mailbox deleted without notice at all perhaps just before the emails started going out?
An explanation of orphaned accounts is here
https://community.virginmedia.com/t5/Email/Orphan-Email-accounts/td-p/3492073
IMHO there is surely something significant about the change from no-notice mailbox deletion to VM suddenly starting giving out the 30 day notifications. I wonder if VM received advice on the legal/data protection aspects of deleting mailboxes before it embarked on its current large scale deletion project and was advised to start giving notification (this is nothing other than speculation on my part, of course).
In quite a few past topics (when instant deletion was in operation) I have suggested that those affected should speak to the ICO about the legal aspects of VM doing that with no notice. I can't recall anyone ever doing that and feeding back the outcome on here.
An ICO complaint normally requires you to first submit a complaint to VM and, if unresolved, ICO will take up the case. ICO timescales are measured in months (based on my own experience when I used them once in the past).
Perhaps you should give them a call and talk through what has happened and ask their advice and explain that the issue is time-critical with the 30 day limitation
https://ico.org.uk/global/contact-us/contact-us-public/
If I was making a case to the ICO it would be along the lines that VM has not reliably followed its published present-day policy of 90 day deletion and that VM has been totally inconsistent in how/when/if mailboxes are deleted in the past. This has led to confusion among users and a lack of transparency in how/when/if the policy is implemented in the past. The passage of significant amounts of time and changes in companies running the service has only added to the confusion. As a result, many users have assumed they were using a 'free' mailbox in the same way that Gmail is 'free'. VM has continued to process and store the customers' personal data so should, therefore, have a responsibility for how it is handled which includes the concept of it being handled 'fairly'. Some would now say that the 30 day notification covers this. Others may say the 30 days is insufficient time to make the necessary changes to mailboxes, contacts and services that have been in place for as much as 30 years. Why have those who may have used their mailboxes the longest been given less notification than those under the current 90 day policy?
In any case, you having nothing to lose by speaking to ICO. If nothing else you might be putting the issue onto the radar of the ICO (although as already stated above the deletions are likely to have been completed before any official response can be made).
I have no idea how the current mailbox deletion process works but, in the past, the first service to disappear used to be webmail followed by access from email client apps a little later. When I deleted my own VM mailboxes in the past they remained in a 'locked' condition for months before I had to get them finally deleted.
Whether or not you have any prospect of data recovery might depend on whether the mailbox deletion is complete to begin with or whether the account is simply locked out in some way with the data remaining and how long VM keeps the mailboxes in that condition.
What seems clear from the many topics on here about this is that, this time around, VM seems intent on closing down these legacy mailboxes with no extensions or exceptions.
Hope you manage to make some progress in some form or another even if it is just regaining access to recover data.
