OK, here's by 10p's worth, having just completed this painful process:
1. I'd like to hang on to my saved emails. Before I forward them to my gmail account is there a better way to archive them?
Yes. My recommendation is, if you already have it on your computer, Microsoft Outlook. It can be given the @virgin.net account to fetch and keep offline. You can then look search through them at any time in the future. If you don't have Outlook, then I recommend Thunderbird Email Client. For both of these, you need to get the "App Password" from Virgin Media to use with the email address - the password you use yourself is different and won't work (because... just malice, I guess)
The advantage of these, is that they can export a csv file (i.e. a spreadsheet) of all your emails, so you can sort the list by sender (or a use pivot table if you're sophisticated) and work through all the senders of mail in the last N years in a systematic way. Outlook is easiest, but the csv output doesn't have the date of the email. Thunderbird needs to have the "ImportExportTools NG" add-on downloaded, but includes the email's date in the output, so you can judge if the last email from a sender was 2019, forget it.
Then, work through the sorted list deciding whether each is (in decreasing amount of effort)
- a) an account you're going to have to log into a website for and fight to change your login email address (I had 106!)
- b) an organisation you've given your email to (e.g. dentist) that you need to notify, and request confirmation that they've done it (I had 13)
- c) a human person you just need to notify. No need for a verification (I had 132)
- d) an email subscribe list, that you need to manually unsubscribe from and re-subscribe to with your new email (I had 10)
- e) just a notification of a purchase, delivery, etc - no need to do anything - just put your new email in when you next buy something, if ever.
For b) and c), you can just paste the list of email addresses into the bcc field of a single email send
2. There are a number of addresses I would like to inform of my new gmail account. Again is there a way to list these from the emails I've saved?
If you have the csv spreadsheet exported from Outlook or Thunderbird, then yes, just paste the email addresses into the bcc box (DON'T send To: or CC: all of them, you shouldn't broadcast everyone's email address to everyone else).
3. I also have a address list which has been automatically added to over the years. Can this be used to generate a contact list for using in the future?
Depends on what format it is in. You can export your contacts from the Virgin Mail web app (My Address books, Contacts, three bars, Export), then import this file into Gmail.
Hope this is helpful and good luck!
