Forgotten email passwords

[jonathan47]

I have three ntl email accounts which are disabled. The email works in Outlook, but webmail does not work. The advice appears to be to change the email password, but that is deal with via a PM, so I cannot use the suggestions in the system.

I appreciate I may have caused the problem, but I would be very grateful if someone from Virgin could help me sort it out.

Thanks

[jonathan47]

Thanks for your response. I am a VM broadband customer and have been for a long time, so the problem isn't related to me leaving Virgin, although there have been times when my patience has been tested.

[Paul_DN · Accepted solution]

Hi jonathan47,

Thank you for reaching out to us in our community and welcome back, sorry to hear webmail isn't working, have you tried deleting the account and setting it up again using our Email Settings here?

Regards

Paul. 

[jonathan47]

Thanks Paul. I shall give it a try and let you know how I get on.

[jonathan47]

Paul.

I have looked for the method to delete one one of my email accounts and then to reinstae it. Unfortunately the link you sent me just produces a blank page apart from the message "no healthy upstream". I have also looked for other messages on deleting email accounts and it appears that Virgin has to delete the email account. Is that correct?If there is a step by step guide to help that would be a great help.

Thanks

Thanks

[Graham_A]

@jonathan47  I believe that Paul_DN may have been referring to deleting the email account from within your email client and then adding it back.  If I understand your initial post correctly then you are not having any problem accessing the email account via Outlook but only via VM Webmail.  If this is the case then you cannot delete the account from VM webmail as it is automatically there as part of your VM email account.  If you were to delete the email address from your My Virgin Media account then this is a one way process and you would not be able to reinstate the address.

What error message do you see when you try and access the email account via VM webmail at https://mail.virginmedia.com/ ?  Knowing this will help to further diagnose this issue.

Also, are the email accounts concerned connected to your current VM broadband account?  If not they me be in an orphaned state and it process of being deleted by VM.  In such cases Webmail access is the first to go but access via an email client such as Outlook may continue longer.

You can check if they are connected by signing into your Primary My Virgin Media account and clicking on Account Settings > Account details and scrolling down to the section near the bottom Manage Other My Virgin Media accounts.  Clicking on the link should open a page with all secondary accounts associated with the primary account.

[jonathan47]

Thanks Graham, this is really helpful. I shall have a look at  it later today and reply more fully to your message.

[jonathan47]

Thanks again Graham. I have had a look at this again. When I sign in to webmail it opens with one email adress and the full complement of messages. All well there and I guess the email accounts are connected to my Virgin account. I have three other accounts which are all not working in webmail.

Two of the accounts show a warning triangle and the message " Account is disabled." they have been like that for months.

The other account was flagged with the same warning and I tried to change the settings hoping that would help. It didn't and now the webmail account reads "The entered credential or authentication information does not work or are no longer accepted by provider. Please change them." I have got myself into a real mess with it and I am confused over which passwords I have used for my email accounts.

The email accounts work perfectly in Outlook, but in an ideal world I would like the webmail to work correctly too. I am hesitant about trying to make further changes in case I screw up the email in Outlook. Perhaps I may just have to settle for the status quo and forget about webmail. I accept that my tinkering may have added to the problem, but I don't think I caused the initial disabling by Virgin. My IT skills are limited, as you can probably guess, but I would have thought that Virgin, having initiated the disablement, had a procedure to reverse it one way or another.

I do appreciate your interest and I hope that I have been clear in explaining the situation.

[Graham_A]

That clarifies the issue somewhat.  It appears that you have added the secondary addresses to your primary VM webmail page.  When you do this VM webmail acts as an email client so since the recent changes made by VM you will need to generate app passwords for the secondary accounts to use in the credentials for the additional accounts in VM webmail.

This process has now become even more complicated as you will need to change the username for each secondary account to a different third party email address in order to generate the app password for each secondary account.

VM have recently changed the log in requirements for accessing VM Mail via third party apps.

If you change the password for the account in My Virgin Media > Account settings > Account details you will not be able to use the new password to access the account via an email client. Email client access now requires an app specific password which can be generated in the MyVM > Account Settings > Account details > Mailbox App password management

https://www.virginmedia.com/dpb/help/change-my-virgin-media-email-address

If you find this all too complicated then it may be a good opportunity to ditch the free VM email addresses and opt for a different free email address provider such as MS Outlook, Gmail etc.

[jonathan47]

Graham,

Thank you so much for your help although the solution sounds a daunting task for me. Nevertheless, I think I shall have a go at it, but there are so many other interesting things that I could do with my life. I do want to ditch two of the email accounts because one has been found on the dark web and the other no longer serves any useful purpose, so I shall try working on one of them. If I mess it up then it will be no great loss and, as you suggested, I have already set up two Outlook accounts. It will be a shame to ditch all the VM accounts though. Two of them have been in use since the early days of email. In fact, when I first set up a personal email account I couldn't find anyone to communicate with. It probably was twelve to eighteen months before there were regular emails.

I am very grateful for your patience and advice. Take care.

Joathon