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]

[jpeg1]

VM won't run email as a paid service, it would be too much trouble. It will be better for them to run email down completely and save paying some staff support hours. 

[ajfhodgson]

>  will doubtless keep that in mind when they are next looking at selecting a broadband provider.

LOL! Never again!

Not sure why anyone would when there are cheaper and better!  Here is Which's 2024 Broadband supplier table of customer satisfaction:

Guess who is at the bottom!

Anyway - back to changing all my website account login contact email addresses: 76 done, 27 stuck, 25 to go! Bah!

[heaton45]

Hi and thanks everyone for the useful posts.  I'm another castaway on the legacy virgin.net account driftwood raft, but am not a VM broadband customer.  Any help with the following would be much-appreciated.  I'm not tech-savvy but happy to follow a step-by-step guide.  Thank you in advance for your help.

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?

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?

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?

[goslow]

This past topic may help with archiving

https://community.virginmedia.com/t5/Forum-Archive/Backing-up-your-Emails-One-of-many-solutions/m-p/...

Do you have an export function in VM webmail for contacts

https://mail2.virginmedia.com/appsuite/help/l10n/en_GB/ox.appsuite.user.sect.contacts.manage.export....

No longer have VM email myself to check if this feature is available or not.

[ajfhodgson]

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! 

[jpeg1]

A very helpful post @ajfhodgson. Sorry I can only give one kudo! 

[goslow]

Second that!

[asterion]

15 days notice.

I have had this virgin.net account for some 25 years. That they would suddenly do this... The complete NIGHTMARE they are creating for so many people...

I will NEVER make another Virgin related purchase in my life. What complete and utter [MOD EDIT: Language]

A.

[ajfhodgson]

Finally, one more source of website logins you need to fix: If you use Chrome browser and its password manager feature, chrome://password-manager/passwords ,  you can go in there, and put your virgin.net email address in the search field - you'll find another few 10s of websites that you probably have to change the login email address for.

You could say, well, I'll change them if/when I ever need to use them again - that's fine for many sites that only send a verification email to the new email address, but a fair proportion send a verification email to the old address, which would fail once virgin.net is rotting in hell.

[jpeg1]

@ajfhodgson

I can just imagine your sense of relief at having got away to a more reliable email service.  There is also an incidental advantage in dropping the old address - you are also leaving behind the spam senders that have attached themselves to it over the years. 

I trust you will not mind that your posts will be linked to others who have been affected by VM email closures, both now and when the next tranche of closures happens.