Blueyonder Email Addresses to be deactivated?

[otronics]

I was on the 'phone with Virgin a few days back discussing several things and the call handler said "by the way, in about 18 months we are discontinuing blueyonder email addresses. You'll have to create a Gmail account". 

She couldn't give an exact date of the cut-off or any more details.

Having used my blueyonder email for almost 25 years, I can't tell you how much of a pain this will be.

Has anyone else heard anything?

[Sabrina_B]

Hi @otronics 👋.

Thanks for reaching out to us regarding Blueyonder email addresses. As long as you retain our services with us, your Blueyonder account will remain active. In the event you choose to leave us, your account will carry a notice period in which to arrange an alternative email address and carry over any data to your new address. 

Should you have any more concerns please feel free to ask away.

Sabrina

[otronics]

I'm a little nervous though as the agent I called said otherwise...

[coenoby]

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@otronics wrote:

I'm a little nervous though as the agent I called said otherwise...

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The thing is that Virgin Media stopped issuing new VM email accounts over a year ago. Since then, new VM broadband customers have to use a third party (non VM) email accounts and existing VM customers such as yourself can no longer create additional secondary VM email accounts.

Clearly, the provision of an email service is no longer part of their business plan going forward and the long term future of the VM email service, not just Blueyonder email accounts, is unclear.

However, that does not necessarily mean that VM will simply close down all VM email accounts.

Sky stopped issuing sky.com email accounts in 2018 but Sky customers with existing sky.com email accounts can still use them.  However, Sky email is now provided by Yahoo Mail not Sky.   VM could do something similar, who knows?

The person you spoke to may have given that advice in good faith but no doubt rumours are circulating around the VM Customer Services teams as to the future of the VM email service. In reality I suspect that they probably know little more about VM's plans for the VM email service than VM's customers do.

Coenoby

[Robert_P]

As advised by Sabrina, as long as you have active services the email address will remain active. Any changes to this and we will notify you prior to the change to allow alternative arrangements to be made, but, at this time we aren't aware of any changes impending.

Rob

[yonder]

Do you have a link to an article that tells you have to "carry over data" from a Virgin email account (I'm blueyonder) to a new non-Virgin email account-address. This is obviously a major problem - old customers like myself have years of valuable emails we would wish to retain. Is there an app for this as there is for changing over smartphones?

[Reece_MH]

Hi yonder 👋

I'm sorry to hear you're concerned about your Virgin Media emails. As mentioned by members of our team, there are currently no changes upcoming to your Email services and as long as you have an active Virgin Media service, these emails will remain active.

We don't have any official articles (such as VM Community posts and VM Blog posts) in relation to a requirement to carry over data, as this is not correct.

Thanks,

[VMCopperUser]

If your using a computer then you can set up a mail app with two IMAP clients you can just copy&paste the emails from one account to another.  You can also usually download/export/save your mail from email clients locally.  I know Thunderbird works - Some others too but I don't have a list.

[Christi_b]

I received exactly the same info from a call handler in Sep '23.  However, he advised that it would be happening around the end of this year, beg of next, and that I should look at creating a gmail e-mail account.

[jpeg1]

The call handlers will tell you anything, so don't believe what they say. But there is no doubt VM is not interested in maintaining email and will drop it one day.

So set up an alternative email account now and start moving your contacts across while you still have plenty of time.

For anyone who has many years of emails in your account, you MUST make a copy offline. An email account is a postal system, not a secure data store.