Virgin Media Community

[colinmel]

One of my sub email accounts was locked (I presume) 24 hours ago after it had received a couple of bounced spam messages that were not sent by me. I have changed the password but still cannot access this email account. I guess someone from VM needs to unlock this account?  Please help!!!

[HowardML]

Your addressed wasn't spoofed. It was hacked. VM will lock accounts when they detect spam being sent using your credentials. Now that you have changed your password wait here for the VM staff here to help you unlock the mailbox. They'll be along soon in this thread.

[colinmel]

(re-posting as I accidentally marked first post as solved - doh!)

One of my sub email accounts was locked (I presume) 24 hours ago after it had received a couple of bounced spam messages that were not sent by me. I have changed the password but still cannot access this email account. I guess someone from VM needs to unlock this account?  Please help!!!

[Steven_L · Accepted solution]

Hey @colinmel,

Welcome to the community and thanks for taking the time to post on our forums.

I'm really sorry to hear that this has happened to you, I have been able to locate your account via your community profile and refresh your mailboxes and their connections to the server. Please could you try to login and let me know if anything has changed.

Regards,

Steven_L 

[ravenstar68]

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@colinmel wrote:

(re-posting as I accidentally marked first post as solved - doh!)

One of my sub email accounts was locked (I presume) 24 hours ago after it had received a couple of bounced spam messages that were not sent by me. I have changed the password but still cannot access this email account. I guess someone from VM needs to unlock this account?  Please help!!!

---

You really need to appreciate that just because you didn't send the messages, that doesn't mean that they didn't come from your account.

VM constantly fight a battle to stop spam being passed through their servers by hackers.  They are fully aware of the difference between hacking and spoofing.  Mail sent has a number of markers in Virgin Media's logs.

Mail From: - Can be spoofed.
Rcpt to: - Can't be spoofed as this is where the mail is sent.
IP address - can't be spoofed as such but can be redirected via a proxy on a third parties machine.
Username and Password - Can't be spoofed as these credentials are used to authenticate the send.
Date and time of send.

So they can differentiate between the following:
Mails sent using your email credentials.
Mails sent using your IP address..

So if VM are locking your account, it's the former that's triggering it.

Tim

[colinmel]

My daughter tells me that her email seems to be working now 🙂 Thank you very much for sorting this out.

Is there anything we can do to try and prevent this happening again?

[Zach_R]

Hi @colinmel,

Thank you for the update. I'm glad to hear that this has all been sorted and resolved now.

If there's anything further that we can assist you with, please do let us know.

Thanks,
 

[ravenstar68]

Try using as strong a password as possible.  Even with the limited character choice VM offers it's still possible to make a fairly strong password using a random letter and number sequence.

Avoid passwords such as Leicester123 (and yes I have seen that used)  Even though VM's system might regard it as strong, it's really not..

Tim