Email account suddenly stopped working without notice after leaving Virgin Media

[Arthur7]

I left Virgin Media over a year ago, but the email account was still working, but suddenly this week it stopped. Can I get it restarted for a couple of weeks so I can retrieve important emails? 

[BillC45]

Terms and Conditions

See -https://www.virginmedia.com/shop/the-legal-stuff/terms-and-conditions-for-fibre-optic-services#broad...

The terms and conditions have always said the below - at Section D6 of the above.

6. Any email address allocated by us to you will at all times belong to us and you may not transfer the address to any person. If this agreement ends, your right to use that email address will also end and you will no longer be able to use the email address, so please make sure you have an alternative email address and let your contacts know of the change, as we cannot do this for you. Please see our acceptable rules policy for more detail on email address usage and our Help and Support page on what happens to your email when you leave us.

And the Acceptable Use Policy at

https://www.virginmedia.com/shop/the-legal-stuff/acceptable-use-policy

says -

Email use

6.5. It is your responsibility to back up the contents of your Virgin Media email account. Upon suspension or termination of services the content may be removed and permanently deleted by Virgin Media without notice.

So -you can wait here for an official response from the VM team in due course – but if you claim never to have read the Terms and Conditions of a service you are using, whose fault is that?

[Arthur7]

Thanks. That’s the rules but doesn’t really help me. 

[Sololobo]

Usually webmail access is first to go, email client access usually lasts a little longer.

You may be able to gain access through the use of an email client and save your emails locally, but you'll have to be quick.

[Arthur7]

Thanks. What’s an email client? 

[Sololobo]

Software which is installed on your computer to access and manage email services, examples of which are MS Outlook, Mozilla Thunderbird, EM Client and many others.

[Molly_G]

Hey @Arthur7,

Welcome to the forums and thanks for your tweet. Sorry to hear you've lost your email account this week. 

Unfortunately, we are unable to retrieve email accounts that are no longer tied to an active account with us - these are what we call 'orphaned' accounts and this usually occurs around 90 days after disconnection of services, however some are often accessible for longer. 

If you do have a different, current account with us then we could try a Move and Transfer of the email, which would re-register the email with the current account using all your old details. 

If there is no current active account, then unfortunately we wouldn't be able to offer further assistance here. Apologies for this.

The advice given above by Sololobo in their previous post may help.

Kind regards,

[Arthur7]

Thanks Molly 😔