Another virgin.net Cancellation Victim

[ajfhodgson]

Hi,

I'm another victim of the unilateral cancellation disaster. Like many others, me and my wife got our @virgin.net email addresses in the 1p/minute dial-up ISP days of 1997.

Reading all the threads, it seems I'm actually fortunate to have got 30 days notice that my identity on the internet for the last 27 years will be summarily deleted.

I'm also fortunate that I set up forwarding/delete-from-server from @virgin.net to an @gmail.com account back in 2008, so there isn't any email I need to download from their servers.

The main issue is that I've been using @virgin.net as my login and/or communication identity for many, many websites, including government gateway, utilities, banks, the council, pension providers, etc etc. The painful part is not informing human correspondents or organisations that my email is changing - that's just sending an email to them. It's changing the identity/contact email on 186 different websites, each of which has a different approach. Some, if you can log in, just let you change it, others send a verification email to the new address, some to the old address, some cannot do it online, you need to talk to customer service. It's a time-consuming nightmare!

I've currently spent over 12 hours working through this, and am about halfway through.

Which brings me to my three questions for you knowledgeable people:

1. I acknowledge that Virgin is getting no revenue from the service it's offering me, But many places (Google, Yahoo, etc) offer email for free - the cost is negligible. If Virgin Media is doing this to save that negligible cost, could they not have offered a paid service, a buy-out? I for one would have been happy to pay £100 for life-time service, even just to avoid the 12 hours spent so far and at least 12 more to come.

2. I have to help an elderly friend who has NOT been forwarding mail to gmail who is facing the same thing. What is the best way to get a csv file download of all email addresses that have sent him email - to make a list to pivot table and work through? Does @virgin.net still support IMAP access, so Thunderbird can suck out all the email (I understand it can generate a csv file)? Does Virgin offer any kind of 'take-out' feature?

3. I got on livechat with Virgin Media support when I first got the email, and having fought through the chatbot "Terri BOT", and then through first line support "Gwyneth Chloe" who didn't understand the question as said "Based on I can see here on your account, we cannot be able to access since it is already disconnected.", I finally got through to second-line team "dedicated team to help you regarding on this matter" member "Sneha" and then got the following reassurance: [MOD EDIT: PERSONAL INFORMATION REMOVED]

• Customer:  Sure . The point is that the email accounts [MOD EDIT: PERSONAL INFORMATION REMOVED]@virgin.net and [MOD EDIT: PERSONAL INFORMATION REMOVED]@virgin.net  were NOT associated with the broadband account - they pre-existed since 1996. So they should NOT be terminated with the broadband account.
• Sneha: Absolutely agree, I did check and can confirm the email account regsitered with us which is Virginmedia .com or Virgin .co.uk emails will be disconnected and you can enjoy rest of the email access and please ignore the notification you've recieved.
• Customer: I was given an email address with the broadband: [MOD EDIT: PERSONAL INFORMATION REMOVED]@virginmedia.com I never used it and am happy to lose that one! But it would be a disaster to lose [MOD EDIT: PERSONAL INFORMATION REMOVED]@virgin.net 
• Sneha: Sure thing, I totally understand, however the email address you've stated above first will be disconnected as that is one registered with us on account.
• Customer: So, you can assure me that I will not lose access to [MOD EDIT: PERSONAL INFORMATION REMOVED]@virgin.net or
  l[MOD EDIT: PERSONAL INFORMATION REMOVED]virgin.net ? That would be a huge relief!
• Sneha: Absolutely, as it's not associated with your broadband contract, all good to go, Andrew.
• Customer: Great - thanks for that reassurance! You had me very worried!

Question 3 - are we absolutely, positively sure that Sneha is talking nonsense, i.e. sure that the virgin.net accounts will be deleted when 30 days are up (and I'm not wasting my entire weekend)?

Many thanks, sorry for the long message and multiple questions, but I'm quite worked up about this!

[MOD EDIT: Personal and private information has been removed from this post. Please do not post personal or private information in your public posts. Please review the Forum Guidelines]

[Graham_A]

As far as I can see the agent is talking nonsense and has it back to front.  If you have a current VM broadband account in the same name as the virgin.net account then VM should be able to get it moved to your current account.

As you have been given duff information I will escalate this thread to the VM Forum Team for a period response.  Look out for their reply here in due course.

[jpeg1]

"many places (Google, Yahoo, etc) offer email for free - the cost is negligible" 

Actually they are not free, you pay for them with your data instead of your money. These companies use your personal login data and the contacts you use to add to the marketing data they collect about you and them. They use this data for targeting adverts at you on the email site and on other sites that they own or share data with. 

It is certainly profitable to them. 

[Daniel_Et]

Hi @ajfhodgson 👋 Thank you for your post and welcome to the Virgin Media Community 😀

We're sorry to hear about the poor experience you've had and that you feel this way 😔

In order to look into this for you further and provide the necessary assurances, we'll send you a private message on here. Look out for the envelope in the top right-hand corner.

If you're on a portable device with a smaller screen, click on the icon in the top right-hand corner and select "messages" from the additional menu options.

Thank you for your support @Graham_A and @jpeg1 👍

Regards,
Daniel

[ajfhodgson]

@goslow

Thanks for this. I downloaded and installed mailstore - looks useful. But it was unable to access [REMOVED]@virgin.net ("server returned: Authentication failed (NO).") either with the default settings, or when I entered manual configuration of server as imap/ssl and imap.virginmedia.com  I used the same password I can successfully use for the webmail at https://mail.virginmedia.com/appsuite/#!!&app=io.ox/mail&folder=default0/INBOX so I'm wondering if the account needs to have IMAP enabled? If so, how do I do that?

Cheers, Andrew.

[MOD EDIT: Personal and private information has been removed from this post. Please do not post personal or private information in your public posts. Please review the Forum Guidelines]

[Graham_A · Accepted solution]

@ajfhodgson You will need to generate an app password for the virgin.net account.  You do this via the My Virgin Media account for the email address concerned so if you don't have access to that it could be problematic.  Have you responded to the PM from @Daniel_Et 

[ajfhodgson]

@Graham_A That's very helpful!  Following your hint, I've created an App Password for the virgin.net email (logging successfully in to my virginmedia,com account), and mailstore is now busily archiving the contents.

And yes, I have replied to @Daniel_Et 's email with all the details.

[smf4122]

You have my sympathies, I'm in the same boat. I may have had mine even longer bc we had ntl (which is another issue suddenly but I'll come back to that). I gave up with that chat bc as you say they don't actually understand what you're saying. So I called, pressed no buttons and eventually got to speak to an actual human! They looked into it, told me there was an account in my name that's been closed so that's why they are deleting the email. I explained there is not and never has been an account in my name. It's in my husband's name with me as a secondary. Once that was cleared up, they said they would ensure that the virgin address is associated with that account (which it always has been) so it will not be deleted. Still I've been unable to access my sky sports app so I called them today, spent an hour on the phone with a woman I cd barely understand and I'm not at all sure I got anywhere at all on this issue. Eventually we established what the email address was, she changed the password on it so at last I cd access the account. However, I made the mistake of also asking what she cd do about the fact that the account is in both my husband's name as well as mine but mine is misspelled. I have tried to get them to fix this forever but she insisted I have to do it myself. She became fixated that I wanted to change the name on the account and I kept trying to explain that I didn't want to change it, merely correct the mistake THEY made many years ago. 

I don't blame you being worked up, right now I just need to go cry in a corner for a while. Call this "service" do ya? Laughable. Complete mess and they refuse to accept any responsibility. 

[ajfhodgson]

Hi,

Update: I had a PM from @Daniel_Et which basically said he couldn't help as I have no current account with them.

But he said he would pass on my feedback on the issue:

- I would like to be able to pay to retain my @virgin.net email account. Virgin Media could make some revenue this way!

- I would like the warning email to have been specific about exactly which email account Virgin Media intends to delete, to avoid confusion

- I would like the warning email to have recommended downloading/installing an offline email client (Outlook or Thunderbird) to download and retain an offline archive of all email and attachments (with a link to a guide on creating an 'App password' to use IMAP. 

- I would like the warning email to have mentioned not just 'Let all your contacts know about your new email address' but also to change your login/contact email address on all websites and in all phone apps where it has been used as your identity - this is the time-consuming kicker!

- I would like your LiveChat support team to be better briefed on the carnage, to know what is being deleted and why, and to be able to advise people how to retain their email messages and attachments in an offline email client and export their email data to a spreadsheet to work through this huge task systematically.

- It should note that Informing your contacts about the email address change can happen after the disabling of the account, but changing the contact email address on websites often requires access to a verification email on the old account, so must be done beforehand.

The idea that prior to a couple of weeks ago, active, 20-year-old virgin.net accounts were being deleted without any warning makes my blood run cold!

Does Branson know his brand is being trashed by people he's sold it to?

[goslow]

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@ajfhodgson wrote:

Hi,

Update: I had a PM from @Daniel_Et which basically said he couldn't help as I have no current account with them.<snip>

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These are all very reasonable and very sensible suggestions.

As a lot of history behind the virgin.net email addresses has emerged and been recounted in different topics on this subject (a history covering decades) it has become clear that this is just more of the same incoherent approach on the part of VM. The one small consolation is that the 'instant-deletion' approach of the recent past has been replaced by the '30 day warning' which at least does give mailbox users some ability to manage the closure.

What is clear is that VM is now determined to close all of the legacy virgin.net mailboxes not linked to a VM broadband account, come what may. General speculation on the forums has been, for a long time, that VM will ultimately ditch email altogether so even those who do manage to associate a virgin.net mailbox to a VM broadband account may find this is not a long term solution.

Anyone who has been adversely affected by the way the virgin.net mailboxes have been shut down will doubtless keep that in mind when they are next looking at selecting a broadband provider.