Email Account Not Working

[Jif1]

Hi, this morning my wife and I both experienced problems with our virginmedia email accounts, as in they weren't working. We were not receiving emails from any source. We tried sending emails to each other, they were present in the sent folders but we did not receive them.

Later in the day my account seemed to sort itself and I started to receive emails again, but my wife's account is now asking her to put her account password back in, we tried that but it didn't make any difference.

It looked to me like there was some kind of problem at the server end which was subsequently fixed and my account started working again but something has glitched on my wife's account.  I am the main account holder and both email accounts come under the main account.

Anytime I try and access my email accounts via MyVirginMedia I always get an error message and it won't let me access them. We phoned Virgin but I could not remember my security password, (it was set up so long ago), and the operator refused to help us in any way. He said he was sending out a new security password but this is by post and will take days to reach us, in the meantime my wife cannot send or receive emails.

I feel that this was initially a problem at the virgin end and they should have done more to resolve this problem.

Any advice would be welcome or if a member of the Virgin team could respond to sort this problem I would be most grateful.

[coenoby]

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@Jif1 wrote:

Any advice would be welcome or if a member of the Virgin team could respond to sort this problem I would be most grateful.

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I am not a VM employee but while you are waiting for a VM Staff member I might be able to offer some advice or at least an insight into the problem.

I'm afraid I have a few questions just for clarification:

In your post you say "Later in the day my account seemed to sort itself and I started to receive emails again," but later on you say "Anytime I try and access my email accounts via MyVirginMedia I always get an error message and it won't let me access them."

So I'm thinking:

• your email account is now working when you use the email app, (perhaps on your phone, or an email client such as Microsoft Outlook or Mail) that you use to manage your emails. However you cannot access it directly on the VM Website.
• On the other hand your wife's email is not working on the app or email client.

Am I missing something?

My questions are:

1. exactly what error message are you getting from My VirginMedia? 
2.  what error message if any do you get when you try to sign in using your email address and password from  here https://mail2.virginmedia.com/ ?  (That should take you straight to your email account without going via "My Virgin Media".)
3. what error message do you see when your wife tries to sign in using her email address and password here https://mail2.virginmedia.com/ ?

The answers to those questions will be useful for VM staff so it should save you time when speaking to them and it might even give me enough to suggest how you could try resolving things with VM's help. 😉

Coenoby

[Jif1]

Hi, thanks for your reply. I'm happy to say that we managed to get my wife's email working again, I phoned VM help again and got a more helpful operator who was happy to ask me a series of questions to verify my identity as I had forgotten my security password, the first operator I spoke to refused to help me!

It was a glitch at their end and he reset the password to her account so we could use the new password to get it functional again.

You are right though, I have never been able to access control of my email accounts via the Virgin Media website, when I click on the email button to get into the control section of my email accounts I get an error message, sorry I can't get this message atm as there is something wrong with the Virgin Media site and I can't login at all atm!

However it's something along the lines of  -  Somethings gone wrong, you cannot access this page at the moment, try again later. Well I've been trying again later for several years now and can't get past this error message.

I'm presuming that I should be able to get into a section in my account where I can reset email address passwords or create new email accounts etc, if I could get into this I could have sorted the problem we had yesterday without having to phone Virgin Help?

Anyway, as I said any help or suggestions appreciated, thanks again for your reply.

[Jif1]

Hi, just tried your link into my mailbox this is the message I get,

"Your mailbox is not available at the moment.

Please try changing your password in the first instance as this may unlock the account following a security precaution taken by our email team.

If you’re ready to create your new password, simply head over to My Virgin Media:

• Select Sign In
• Select Forgotten your email or password? under the password box
• Follow the instructions to change your password
• Remember do not use existing or previous passwords. Further help can be found here
• Check out the Virgin Media Security Hub or our Security Matters community page for further email help & support
  
  

Should this fail to unlock the account, please retry signing in again in one hour and make sure you are using the correct password to access your email from all of your devices."

This is what I get anytime I try and get to my mailboxes.

[Jif1]

Incidently, I have tried what it suggests, changing my login password on several occasions but it has never made any difference.

I think it needs a VM operator to fix this, if any are reading this I would appreciate if you could have a look at the problem for me and fix it so I can access my email accounts.

TIA

[coenoby]

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@Jif1 wrote:

Your mailbox is not available at the moment.

I'm presuming that I should be able to get into a section in my account where I can reset email address passwords ............. I could have sorted the problem we had yesterday without having to phone Virgin Help?

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Thanks for that update. Yes, if you get that "not available" error message you can often regain access to the email account simply by resetting the password to something you have not used before.

You could try resetting the password to your email account from here https://www.virginmedia.com/my-virgin-media/forgotten-details/password You will be asked to enter some specific security information from your My Virgin Media Account. That's not the password that customer services wanted, it could well be date of birth and mother's maiden name for example.

The issue with your My Virgin Media account sounds like a separate issue unrelated to the email account issue. Is the error you are seeing "oops something is broken"?  Others have reported not being able to access the "Manage Accounts" section of their VM account and it seems that is something VM are currently trying to resolve.

Hopefully the forgotten password link will enable you to to regain access to the email account.

However resetting the email password will not restore access to allow to manage the email accounts set up in your VM account. That will definitely need VM's Technical Team to resolve it as it is outside the scope of the first line customer support.

Coenoby

[Jif1]

Hi, well yesterday the Virgin media site was all over the place so I thought I'd wait until today before trying anything again. This morning I logged into my Virgin media account and clicked on manage email and hey presto it worked! I got access to the page and was able to edit or create new email addresses.

This is the first time in years that I've managed to get access to them so I'm presuming that Virgin have been working on a general problem re this fault and have fixed it.

This is good news and means any password problems etc I have in the future I can fix myself without having to phone a VM operator, phew!

Thanks to coenoby for your help with this much appreciated.  

Spoke too soon, just tried to go back in to my email page, got an error message and now I can't even login to the VM site. I'm presuming this is a general problem with the site as per yesterday where it was up and down like a yoyo.

Will try again later and see if it's been sorted.

[Ayisha_B]

Hi @Jif1,

Welcome to our Community Forums and thanks for your post.

I'm sorry to hear you are your wife were both having some issues accessing your email accounts but glad you've now managed to get this sorted 🙂

A big thanks to @coenoby for helping as always. 

If you need any further assistance with anything @Jif1, just give me a shout. 

[Jif1]

Thanks for your reply Ayisha, the problem has indeed been resolved and this morning I continue to be able to access the email accounts on the VM website should password changes etc be required, so I'm hopeful that this problem has been fixed long term.

Cheere

[Jif1]

Although I can get access to my email accounts I still cannot view emails via the VM site. I get the following message,

"

Your mailbox is not available at the moment.

Please try changing your password in the first instance as this may unlock the account following a security precaution taken by our email team.

If you’re ready to create your new password, simply head over to My Virgin Media:

• Select Sign In
• Select Forgotten your email or password? under the password box
• Follow the instructions to change your password
• Remember do not use existing or previous passwords. Further help can be found here
• Check out the Virgin Media Security Hub or our Security Matters community page for further email help & support
  
  

Should this fail to unlock the account, please retry signing in again in one hour and make sure you are using the correct password to access your email from all of your devices."

This doesn't particularly bother me too much as we are getting our emails in client software on our particular devices. I could try changing the passwords as suggested but this would mean re-setting all our accounts on all our devices which I'm hesitant to do as they are working OK atm and as they say "If it's not broke don't fix it".

Also it's not totally clear whether it's the main VM account password that needs to be changed or the individual passwords for each email account.