I appear to be getting nowhere with the over-the-phone help from Virgin Media customer support, despite having spent countless hours speaking to different technical support people but never getting a satisfactory resolution.
It all started back in February last year 2020, when I decided that I should no longer be the bill payer on my mother's Virgin Media account since I was no longer living at the family home. My mother wanted to take advantage of online access to her future bills, once she became the bill payer, and this would only be possible once she became the primary account holder. I did however still wish to maintain my two @blueyonder.co.uk email addresses which I have been using for many years and which are known by all my clients and contacts.
We were informed by Virgin Media that my account would be transferred to my mother and that she would then become the primary account holder and I would become a secondary account holder. I did not realise that my account would in effect be deleted and that an entirely new account would be opened for my mother, thereby deleting my email addressed in the process. I was not warned that this would happen nor advised on how to protect my existing email addresses before the closure.
Various paper work was signed and, seemingly, things seemed to be going in the right direction. I stopped receiving the monthly bills and there were, instead, sent to my mother. For months, right up until 19 August, my emails continued to work without problem.
One day, my mother attempted to sign into her account online. It said she was still a secondary account holder. We spoke to Virgin Media and after numerous calls, they managed to solve the problem and she was able to finally enter her account online. At that very second, at the point at which she logged in for the first time, on 19th August, my emails suddenly stopped working. It appears that her signing in to her new account must have triggered the process whereby my old account was closed and emails addresses, associated with my old account, became unusable.
I was shocked since I had had been given no warning that this would happen.
Over the following days I had to change every single account I possess online, informing every service I use of the email issue and providing them with an alternative email address so that I could still continue to operate my business safely. It was a huge waste of time and caused me a great deal of stress because clients and contacts were (and presumably are) still sending emails to my original @blueyonder.co.uk addresses and of course I am not receiving them and have no way of doing so.
Furthermore, there seems to be no system in place whereby the sender is informed that their emails are not being received by me. Normally, with an email address that has become invalid, the sender would receive some kind of “un-deliverable" warning email telling them that their email has not be delivered to the recipient. However, in this case, no such warning email is being sent.
This is a major security issue and one that Virgin Media has so far been unable to satisfactorily explain to me. All they say is that the emails are not being intercepted so there is no security issue. However, how do I know where these emails are going to?
Upon checking my old email addresses on a mail tester (such as https://mailtester.com), both my @blueyonder.co.uk emails are being shown as valid and active. How can this be, if Virgin Media have made them inactive? And where are the emails being sent to ?
Ideally, I would love to get my old email addresses back - since I have been using them every since I signed up with @blueyonder.co.uk, many years ago, and they have become very personal. At the very least , though, I would like there to be some way of automatically informing anyone who writes to those addresses, that they are now invalid. Finally, I want to be assured that these emails are indeed closed and deleted.
Otherwise, as I said, there is a real security risk of personal information being sent to my old addresses, and my not being able to access it.
