Can't log into email even though i never logged out

[mr-joshua]

I never log out of my email account and have been asked to enter my password to go in this is across all devices.

I keep getting the message "unable to verify account name or password". this happened on the 28th April 2023

[Joseph_B]

Hey @mr-joshua,

Welcome to the Community Forums and thanks for the post.

Sory to hear that you are having this issue, can you confirm for me do you still have an active Virgin Media account with us? If you do not, we would close off any Virgin email accounts after 90 days of the account being inactive, this can in some instances take longer which is why you may not have realised this will happen.

If you do however have an account, we would advise performing a password reset to something never used before, waiting around 20 minutes, then trying to log in again with the new password.

Thanks. Joe

[mr-joshua]

@Joseph_B

No i do not currently have any broadband or TV services into my property. However I have had the email long before I was a virgin customer, hence why its an ntlworld email and not Virgin so why has it been cut off? If that is the case.

[Steven_L]

Thanks for coming back to us mr-joshua, if you no longer have an active Virgin Media broadband connection, your email address may have been deleted, this should be done 90 days after your services have been disconnected. When did you last have services with us?

Kind Regards,

Steven_L

[VMUser1812]

Back in the day, NTL and Blueyonder merged, along with Virgin Mobile and rebranded the whole enterprise as Virgin Media, as such they ‘took over’ the ntlworld.com addresses and also started to phase them out in favour of @virginmedia.com addresses. But effectively they are all the same. 

So to use any of the VM-owned addresses (and that includes any ntlworld.com addresses) you have to be a current broadband subscriber. Otherwise, they will, at some point, clean them up and delete the mailbox and address. This is what appears to have happened to yours’.

[mr-joshua]

I left virgin media over 2 years ago. So your telling me the email I have bee using for over twenty years is now gone, along with the communication links to all my companies contacts with customers, suppliers and agencies.

[coenoby]

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@mr-joshua wrote:

 the email I have bee using for over twenty years is now gone, along with the communication links to all my companies contacts with customers, suppliers and agencies.

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Sorry to say this, but yes, that is correct.

In the past, it seemed that Virgin Media  were lax in apply the 90 days deletion period specified in their Terms and Conditions. As you have discovered, they often left email accounts open for years after the original broadband account was closed. However, over the years there have many , many,  posts on this forum similar to yours from ex VM customers who suddenly lost access to their old VM email accounts because VM had finally got round to deleting them.

There is a back story to more recent cases such as yours though.

About a year ago VM stopped issuing new email accounts to customers. New VM broadband customers have to use a third party (non VM) email account) to sign up for services and existing customers can no longer create additional secondary VM email accounts.

Currently VM do still support the email accounts of existing broadband customers but the whole longer term future of the VM email service is unknown. The two obvious options are for them to either move the accounts over to an dedicated email provider such as AOL / Yahoo! or to simply close the whole VM email service down.

In the light of that recent decision about their email service, VM do seem to be having a clear out of email accounts that are not attached to a broadband accounts and sadly, that leaves you in an extremely stressful situation.

The simple fact is that the provision of an email clearly is no longer seen as a part of VM's long term business plans. In truth though,their email service was always a pretty basic offering and in my opinion it was never suitable for business use. Certainly I never used it for the two small (one person) businesses that have operated over the years.

Coenoby