Email account no longer exists

[Peteypablo]

My partner is in literal tears as her only email account of 20years won't let her access it, customer service absolutely useless, been told to wait 2 days, then after that they said okay we'll create a ticket with IT wait another 5 days, there's nothing else we can do.

She's distraught, we've got tickets we need to access for an event this weekend Virgin just shrugged their shoulders.

She can't pass verification on any of her other apps, she's just spent an hour on the phone to the bank explaining why she can't log in, the fall out from this is endless our legal documents our mortgage nhs appointments what the hell are we supposed to do? It will take weeks and months to sort out, it's an utter disgrace company we trusted could do this.

If you're closing everyone's account maybe notify them, you'd need TV ads and a notice period at least, I'm not even sure this is legal. 

[Peteypablo]

She would have posted this herself but she hasn't got a bloody email!!

[goslow]

Are you/your partner currently VM broadband customers? If you are, there may be a possibility of rescuing the mailbox and associating it with the VM broadband account (but there are conditions to be met to do that and you need to engage with a VM forum team person on here to go through the options).

If you/your partner are not with VM for broadband, then you have more of a struggle. You appear to already have seen the topic here

https://community.virginmedia.com/t5/Email/virgin-net-email-swindle-Tell-BBC-Rip-Off-Britain/m-p/558...

where temporary access was regained via ICO and DPO. There is a second post here

https://community.virginmedia.com/t5/Email/EMAIL-ACCOUNT-CLOSURE-RESOLUTION-virgin-net/td-p/5589588

where the customer got a different outcome via the VM executive team. You will have to search for the email address as it gets removed if posted on here (even though the address is in the public domain on VM's own web help pages). You may be able to regain temporary access via that route. Unfortunately though, you may not get the same outcomes via either method above as VM is so inconsistent in its support responses.

I would suggest speaking to the ICO in any event, if for no other reason than to log what VM is doing. The more people that do that, the greater the chance that the ICO may take an interest. IMHO it is not right that VM is closing these mailboxes without notice given how important an email address can now be to a person's identity.

The general pattern of these closures seems to be that, to begin with, the mailbox enters a 'locked' condition where it still exists but is inaccessible to the user. Later on it becomes permanently deleted and cannot be recovered. As per the first link, it appears it may be possible to regain access from the locked condition in order to rescue data and change addresses etc.

I hope you can regain access and recover your data.

[Alex_RM]

Hi Peteypablo,

Thanks for posting and welcome to our community 😊

We begin contacting former Virgin Media customers via email who still have an active Virgin Media email account to make them aware that we'll soon be closing said email account.

Upon receiving the initial notification, we'll send a reminder email 15 days after, and finally fully close the email account 30 days after.

As goslow has advised, if you still have an active broadband account we can try to transfer the email address over to it.

Please let us know.

Alex_Rm