LOST ACCESS TO VIRGIN.NET EMAILS

[FFRE]

Hi I have had my Virgin.net email for over 20 years ago and yesterday it stopped working , I was directed to a help page and was instructed to use an alternative email address to log in and to change my password. I carried this out and verified my email address and I still have no access to my emails as it just keeps telling me my details are incorrect. I waited for over an hour to talk to someone from virgin on the chat page and after 10 minutes of discussions they then informed me that Talk Talk were in charge of virgin.net emails and to contact them. 

When I contacted Talk Talk and eventually got to talk to someone in the Tech department he rudely stated that it was nothing to do with them and they had nothing to do with Virgin.net emails , I asked him why Virgin would tell me that if it was not true and all I got was well I do now know and he then hung up on me. 

Is there anyone that can help me recover my email as I use it for my business. 

[goslow · Accepted solution]

Are you currently a VM broadband customer?

VM has recently been closing down a lot of legacy mailboxes not linked to a current broadband account.

[Kath_P]

Hi FFRE, 

Thanks for taking the time to contact us via the Community. It's lovely having you on board with us in the Forums. ⭐

We're sorry to hear you're having issues accessing your virgin.net email account. Anyone who had a dial up service with us, was given access to an email account however when the service closed, the email addresses were only meant to remain open for 90 days to allow you the time to move everything over to a new email. After the 90 days, the email address would then be removed. We've recently picked up that several accounts have remained open and we're running clean up activities now to remove these. 

The only way to gain access to the email is for us to connect it to an active Virgin Media broadband in your name. If you have this, pop back and let us know. We can link the two and work to recover the email. If you don't have a Virgin Media broadband account in your name then I'm afraid it wouldn't be possible to recover the email address. You would need to look at creating a new email address with an email provider. 

Thanks, 

[FFRE]

HI Kath,

I do not have an active Virgin account in my name but my partner has one for our home , he called Virgin last night and they said he cannot add my old email address to his account and they would not be able to recover it. I have had this email address for over 20 years as part of my business and got no notification that it was being deleted. We are willing to pay for a service just to get the email address back but the sales team say they cannot guarantee this and all they can do is sign me up for a service and then I would need to contact customer services to see if they could help. 

Is there any help you can give me as I need access to my emails to run my business. 

Thanks

[goslow]

See below for some reasons why signing up to VM broadband in order to try and rescue a virgin.net mailbox would probably not be a very good idea.

https://community.virginmedia.com/t5/Email/Re-Email-from-Virgin-Media-about-closing-my-email-account...

This customer, in similar circumstances, managed to regain temporary access via this approach

https://community.virginmedia.com/t5/Email/virgin-net-email-swindle-Tell-BBC-Rip-Off-Britain/m-p/558...

but there are no guarantees you will have similar success as VM's customer service responses are not consistent enough. In any event you should probably speak to ICO as VM deleting mailboxes with no notification is unacceptable IMO. This is particularly so since VM's processes before deletion have been inconsistent with some getting 90 days (as per current T&Cs), some getting 30 days, some getting no notification and some still finding mailboxes have not been deleted at all (even when the customer was actually expecting this).

If you do regain access, see this post from another user in a similar situation with an approach you could try

https://community.virginmedia.com/t5/Email/Another-virgin-net-Cancellation-Victim/m-p/5583582#M28101...

another backup method using free software is here

https://community.virginmedia.com/t5/Forum-Archive/Backing-up-your-Emails-One-of-many-solutions/m-p/...

Hope you are able to get to some kind of resolution.

[Ashleigh_C]

Thank you for reaching back out @FFRE and we are so sorry that you have faced this issue with your email, we can fully understand your frustrations in regards to this.

If an email is not attached to a current and active Broadband account then we cannot reinstate it, any active Broadband accounts would need to be in your name in order for us to attach the email. We are so sorry again that this has happened. 

[FFRE]

Thank you so much for your helpful links, I am absolutely exhausted with VM, they are happy to sign me up and customer service assured me that they would then be able to retrieve my deleted email, since talking to the Sales team I know this is incorrect. 

[John_GS]

Hi @FFRE 

Thanks for coming back to us. 

We have advised correct but I will send you a PM to see if anything we can do.

[Bigscottie]

Hi Kath, I am having a similar issue and I would like to connect the old mailbox to my current virgin account.
Can you advise how I can go about this?
Regards

Owen

[Zach_R]

Hi @Bigscottie,

Thank you for your post and welcome to our community forums. We're here to help.

I'm sorry to hear you're having some issues with an email account. I'm going to send you a private message shortly so we can take some further details and look into this for you.

Thanks,