@ST819717 what I will do is to escalate this thread to the forum team who will offer to contact you and see what can be done.
But, I have to be honest and set expectations here, both your and your wife's virgin.net accounts are orphaned as such are prone to being deleted at any point - they should have been deleted some three months after you stopped being a VM broadband customer, or it you never were one, a few months after the old legacy virgin dial up and ADSL services were terminated which was back in 2015/2016.
Either way, you both have been fairly lucky to have retained your email accounts up to now and Virgin will claim (not unreasonably) they they DID notify you of the closing of your emails as this was in the T&Cs you originally agreed to - in fact it could be argued that if you are not a customer of theirs's then VM should hold no details about you (GDPR), have no right to contact you and were they to do so they could be in breech of GDPR regulations
There have been numerous posts from people in exactly your position where VM have managed to restore access to the mailbox but on a strictly temporary basis, and when it goes off again (and it will), that's it - there are no second chances. But more recently there have been instances where VM have said that this is not possible - either because of a change in policy or possibly because the mailbox has already been fully deleted and hence there is nothing to restore access to!
So, I'm sure that they will do their best to help but you should be prepared for the possibility that the mailbox and all emails within it have been deleted with no chance of recovery. I would strongly suggest that your wife also makes immediate provision to setup an alternative email account and move everything across before that, too, is deleted.
