Finally Leaving the Building After 28 years - Email Domain Question

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Mattseyboy wrote:

Well it's been emotional and had its fair share of frustrating up and downs since the days of nynex, cable & wireless, NTL and now VM and the service is currently the best it's been for a long time but after 28 years loyal service and like most it's time to vote with my wallet and move on.  

I've called to cancel and all the agent is interested in is upselling me for £13 more a month than I've been paying for the last 18 months despite me saying I can get the equivalent level of service that I want (TV/BB/Tel) from both Community Fibre and Sky for £45 a month as a new customer, I was simply told £68 is the best VM can muster these days for Maxit TV, 500 Volt BB and an Unused Telephone or £414 more over the 18 month term...shocking when they can offer a new customer a deal for £34-£40 for this at present, I'd have actually stayed for £45/ month!.

Anyway the agent that processed the cancellation when asked about how long i have to migrate my email addresses over to gmail etc said "there's no fixed time, could be 30, 60 days or more and no one really knows", probably a scare factor as i'm sure it was 90 days, is anyone able to confirm?

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Officially it is 90 days from when the contract ends (ie some 120 days from when you give notice), and although there have been reports on here from people claiming that VM terminated their broadband connection early, (which is exactly what happened to my ex), I can’t recall ever seeing anyone saying that their email was killed off early. If anything it’s the reverse!

As Adduxi, rightly says above, start by setting up an auto-forwarder to your gmail account and make sure that it doesn’t keep a copy in your VM mailbox. Then remove all of the emails in it and move them to your gmail account - basically empty the VM mailbox and keep it empty.

Then, and this is a real pain but necessary, go through any and all of your contacts and inform them of your new address and to use that in future; start with banking and medical and work down from there. What can, and according to reports on here does, happen is that VM either eventually delete the ‘account’ associated with the mailbox but leave the mailbox itself working, which means that the forwarding still works, but you have lost control over it; or, more worryingly, the account becomes compromised or hijacked by another party who start using it. Now, in theory, this shouldn’t matter since you will already have disassociated it from any other company. For example, they try to reset, say, your Facebook account login password - but you have already changed your Facebook account to your new gmail address, so that fails!

At worst, if the forwarding is still active, you may get a load of rubbish messages to your gmail address, but these can also be filtered out.