Everyone affected needs to send an email to; & cc: [MOD EDIT: Staff email address removed]
This will raise your concerns & hopefully get a resolution. there’s also the ombudsman www.commsombudsman.org if a satisfactory solution isn’t offered & ends up being deadlocked with your reasonable request.
Hi emailclosing,
Thank you for your post and welcome to our community forums. We're here to help.
We would encourage any one of our customers to get in touch with us if they have any queries or concerns with any aspect of their service, including email, so that we can address it accordingly and do what we can to resolve it.
Please do let us know if there's anything that we can help you with.
Thanks,
emailclosing wrote:Everyone affected needs to send an email to; & cc: [MOD EDIT: Staff email address removed]
This will raise your concerns & hopefully get a resolution. there’s also the ombudsman www.commsombudsman.org if a satisfactory solution isn’t offered & ends up being deadlocked with your reasonable request.
Most, who have received the letter, will no longer be customers of VM and have been using the mailbox for free. I can't see any basis by which they can complain since VM is now giving them notice of deletion (as opposed to the previous policy of no-notice deletion).
Another group will be current VM broadband customers who have orphaned email addresses and VM is offering to try to associate those with their broadband account. That too seems reasonable.
A smaller sub-group of current broadband customers may have orphaned email addresses but may not be able to associate them with a current broadband account for one reason or another.
It is only really this last group who (possibly) has grounds for complaint.
VM's complaint process can take up to 28 days. A complaint to the ombudsman requires a complaint to VM first of all and then has its own timescale. Chances are any disputed mailboxes will have been deleted long before any resolution to a complaint is offered.
VM complaint process completed, ombudsman case raised, accepted & progressing, let’s see what happens & maybe keep positive for others to which this is a big deal.
Must also stress for others the need to ignore the doom & gloom posts of some contributors! all is not lost as it comes to light the MSE platform (Martin Lewis) are showing signs of interest to investigate & a BBC consumer show. So consumers do have some power over so called big business 💪
You should read some of my many past posts on the subject of email deletion before making too many assumptions about a doom and gloom attitude, such as the two most recent posts here
Coincidentally, after few days after posting the above, this was when the current round of 30-day-notice letters first started going out (too late for the OP in that topic, unfortunately).
For a very long time VM has deleted legacy mailboxes without warning. Now VM has started giving 30 days notice so something has changed to prompt this, perhaps some advice on the legality of doing this with no warning. The 30 days period has, no doubt, been chosen to give users a window of opportunity to make the necessary changes but insufficient time to make any successful objections. Keep us posted on the outcome of your ombudsman complaint.
They'll have to hurry, before the emails are closed.
I can't help but think that this is just the beginning of a planned programme of legacy email account closures with perhaps the blueyonders and telewests next, followed by the ntlworlds, etc, until the end. I would hope VM learns the lessons from this round of closures by perhaps being more open and public about its plans, extending the notice period to three months, and giving clearer instructions on backing up emails and migrating accounts. It all seems to have been too sureptitious and out of the blue.
Exactly so, Cardiffman282 although I doubt VM will learn and change anything from the current round of bungling confusion. It never seems to each time a widespread issue arises.
The current round of closures seems to be a matter of consolidating the remaining email users into a much smaller group and trying to eliminate the virgin.net users altogether. Once this is complete, there may well be some other scheme in waiting. Maybe just allow this remaining group to gradually disappear through natural wastage as customers leave. Maybe sell off those email users to a third party or maybe make email a chargeable add-on VM subscription service for the remaining email users (perhaps the most likely one IMO as it will be another revenue stream for VM).
Certainly, VM email is on the way out. But I can’t imagine they'd introduce a paid service when the existing one is so unreliable and generates so many complaints
Email is not their core business, and they'll drop it completely before long.
Most likely you are right, jpeg1. But look at how many people posting are absolutely determined to try to keep their old VM mailboxes, rather than moving to a third party provider. I imagine some of those would readily pay up rather than move even if it was a time-limited subscription option prior to a full shut down at some point in the future?
Just had a discussion with the communication ombudsman they state that virgin media have said talk talk have control over the legacy emails? Is this a fact? If so may open up another avenue to explore? Just to clarify this is an official response from VM to the ombudsman on the email closure issues.
I wonder if the Ombudsman just called offshore customer services...
The TalkTalk past involvement is explained here
https://community.virginmedia.com/t5/Email/Orphan-Email-accounts/td-p/3492073
