Email is unavailable

[rogersr13]

Hi I was emailing fine 30 mins ago now it states my account is unavailable! is there a general issue or is it my account?

Cheers

[rogersr13]

 Hi I am in the same situation and I am panicking as I need to get my legal emails due to a court case I lost my email two days ago can I escalate this to a senior manager I was with Virgin Broadband since NTL days which is approx twenty years! The only reason I am not with Virgin now is Virgin are unable to supply broadband  at my property. Kind regards Rob

[jem101]

@rogersr13 as per the original poster here, I have escalated this to the forum team who hopefully will reply and offer to contact you by private message.

However I do have to stress that there are no guarantees with this, the staff have indeed sometimes been able to restore access, albeit for a limited time, but in other cases the process has proceeded too far for this to be done and the mailbox and all the mail within it has been irretrievably lost. VM's official policy as described in the Ts and Cs (which naturally hardly anyone bothers to read but still) is that once you are no longer a customer for what ever reason, the mailbox should be deleted after 90 days. This doesn't always happen and people carry on using it assuming  that it will always be there. In reality the clock is ticking and at some point it gets caught up in a periodic cleanup and deleted.

Fingers crossed, thought that they will be successful in your case, but even if they are, it is only a temporary one-off reprieve. You absolutely have to set up an alternative email address, notify all of your contacts and make arrangements to backup any emails you want to keep. Because it is an absolute certainty that the mailbox will eventually be locked out again in preparation for deletion and there are no second chances.

[jem101]

@rogersr13 I see that you have raised this point by tacking it onto a different thread, I did reply on that one and escalated it to the forum team before I realised that this thread existed and @Zach_R has already responded to it.

Firstly, just like Microsoft and Google, VM do not maintain backups of mailboxes or emails at all, that is the responsibility of the user so if the mailbox has been deleted as as an orphaned one, ie not associated with a live VM broadband account then there is nothing to restore. There are cases where the forum team have managed to temporarily restore access to a mailbox which hadn't progress too far down the deletion route, but not always. There does seem to be different criteria for when it is possible and when it isn't, but if @Zach_R has already looked into this and believes that it can't be recovered then I'm sorry to say that this may well be the case here.

[rogersr13]

Hi Jem,

Thank you for your response I don't think anyone has looked at the account they have only given their thoughts on it, no one has asked me for the email account name!

I only need temporary access then it can be closed.

Kind regards

Rob

[coenoby]

@rogersr13"I don't think anyone has looked at the account they have only given their thoughts on it, no one has asked me for the email account name!"

I think that you have confused matters by posting on that old thread "Virgin.net email de-activated without warning" . I can understand why you did that out of frustration but sadly it really does not help.

@jem101  certainly flagged your post there to the Forum Team (at 20.06 last night) but at the moment I cannot see where @Zach_R has responded to you.

Zach's response may have got lost between the two threads you have now got running. Do you see this at the top of the Forum page? The 1 against the purple envelope indicates that you have a private message - presumably from a Forum Team member? If so click on the purple envelope and respond to message.

In the meantime I am going to escalate this again to the Forum Team.

Coenoby

[Zach_R]

Hi @rogersr13,

I do apologise for any confusion here. Based off of what you've described in your posts, if the impacted email account has not been linked to an active broadband service for more than 90 days then it will have been deactivated and deleted.

However, for your peace of mind and to ensure that we've checked everything for you, I'll send you a private message in a few moments to take a few more details and we can go from there. Please respond to this at your earliest convenience.

Thanks,
 

[Natalie_L]

Hi rogersr13, 

Thank you for reaching out to us here on the Community. 

I am very sorry to hear you have lost access to your email account. I would like to try and help so I am going to pop you over a private message to confirm some details and we can go from there. 

This message will be available via the purple envelope on the top right of this page. 

Speak soon,