Posting here in the hopes that someone can advise and help push this forward - my mother is retired and living alone and is not technically minded. She has had an ntlworld email for nearly 20 years which she uses as her primary email address.
She noticed she wasn't receiving emails to Thunderbird on the 25th; I checked and the password was no longer being accepted. Separately, her virginmedia.com email inbox appeared to be locked ('Mailbox not available at the moment'). Resetting the overall account password did not resolve this and no option existed to reset the ntlworld email password, which did not appear associated with the account.
On the first call, on the 25th, I was told that it was an easy fix, and to try again in half an hour with a temp password I was given on the phone. An hour and a half later, with no success, I called back and was told that no, it would take three to five working days. I wasn't confident this representative even had access to the ticket (as they kept saying 'I'll check' when I asked them if they could see the notes), so after hanging up called again. The third rep said a ticket had been raised to resolve the virginmedia.com email inbox lock. After some effort I was able to make it understood that her ntlworld email address also wasn't working and I was given a ticket reference. She said she would call my mother back on 1st Dec, or failing that on the following Friday.
Someone called my mother on the 1st but she is adamant they didn't give her a password; they just told her 'the account is working' and hung up. I phoned back on the 2nd and was given a password which I was able to test on the phone and confirm belonged to the virginmedia.com email - not the ntlworld.com email. After once again explaining the situation, I was told another 3-5 working days; I stressed that my mother uses her email for her GP as well as her bills and that at this point she had been at least a week without email. At this point I was told compensation could be discussed after service was restored.
I noticed in the meantime in the My Virgin Media that someone had submitted a request to change the account log-in name to the ntlworld.com address, with an instruction to 'click the link in the email we've sent you'. This email has presumably been sent to the ntlworld.com address.
The following Thursday (9th), neither myself nor my mother having heard anything, I phoned again, and was told the problem had been resolved, but because I was not the account holder, the new password could only be given to my mother. I phoned her and asked her to call the customer support line. She reported that she had spoken to someone who had told her that her ntlworld.com email had been deleted, that she had been notified a year earlier by email (?) and that the ntlworld brand had been sold to TalkTalk. She was understandably very upset.
I phoned back to try and get a sense of why we were hearing such wildly different things from customer support. The rep I spoke to could not understand from the ticket what the actual situation was (and couldn't confirm whether or not the email address had been deleted) but said I could raise a complaint, which would be answered within 48 hours; I asked if the response could be to my mobile as I have been dealing with this for my mother and was told yes. Neither myself nor my mother have received any follow-up.
What's the next step? Can anyone get in touch to definitively confirm the status of the address? I have set my mother up with a Gmail account as she now doesn't trust the virginmedia.com address, but obviously as she's used the email for so long many different accounts use it - as well as being the address all her friends know for her.
