Virgin Media Community

[dhartiey]

I am trying to help a friend who is is not very tech savvy and hard of hearing. She is a Virgin Media customer who uses an ntlworld.com email address. The email address was working fine until Thursday evening (5 August). She accesses the email via iPhone and iPad and suddenly was unable to send or receive email. The error message says that the password for the account is missing, although it is definitely present in settings and we reentered it for completeness.

When I was with her this morning we tried to log into her Virgin Media webmail. There we received a message saying 

'Sorry!
Your mailbox is not available at the moment.

Please retry again in one hour and make sure you are using the correct password to access your email from all of your devices'.

Waiting an hour does not help.

Worryingly I have also tried to validate her email address on Mailtester.com. This has come back saying that the email address is not valid.

I'd be so grateful for some help as to where to go next. She relies on this email address for most of her communication with the outside world and is quite distressed.

[Graham_A · Accepted solution]

@dhartiey  Mailtester.com no longer provides accurate results for virginmedia and the legacy domain email addresses.

The first thing to try is to reset the password for the ntlworld email account concerned via the My Virgin Media page for the account.

If this does not resolved the mailbox unavailable situation then wait for the VM Forum Team to reach this thread and they will be able to help.  However, they will need the account holder to clear security questions with them first.

[David_Bn]

Thanks for your post @dhartiey and a very warm welcome to you!

Sorry to hear of the issues with the E-Mail account, can you tell me if you've been able make a change the to password via our web mail portal to see if this allows the account holder to gain access to the account?

As @Graham_A says, we would need to work with the account holder to make alternations to the account on our side, is it possible for them to comment on this thread for us to pick up, if the struggles are on going?

Kindest regards,

David_Bn

[ravenstar68]

I'm going to repeat what I've said before about iOS

The error message "Password is missing!" is down to improper programming by Apple.

There are several stages to a mail send.

1. Connection
2. Client Greeting
3. Authentication
4. Client sends Envelope-sender (Address where bounces are to be sent)
5. Client sends Envelope recipient/s (Address/es where mail is to be sent)
6. Client sends email message itself.

A mail send can fail at each of these points and normally a mail client would give an appropriate error message:

e.g.  Fails at 1 - Cannot connect to server
        Fails at 3 - Invalid username or password (Not always password errors mind you)
        Fails at 6 - Message content rejected (or something similar)

However in iOS - when a message fails at step 6 iOS incorrectly reports password missing instead.

I've verified this personally by sending a message using iOS mail that I knew contained content that would be rejected resulting in the error that the OP was seeing.  Once the offending content was removed from the mail - the mail sent successfully with o changes to my username or password.

So I'd be looking at the message she's trying to send rather than the password.

Tim

[Graham_A]

@ravenstar68  In this case the op was getting the mailbox unavailable message in webmail as well as the iOS errors.

[dhartiey]

Thanks for all these helpful comments. Just to say that changing the email password on the Virgin Media site worked and email is now flowing again. 

[Celestines]

If you have attached the file type other than this, then there is a chance for this issue to occur. Try to change the selected file type and try to send the email message with the attachment.

[Molly_G]

Hey @dhartiey,

Thanks for the update - glad to hear this is working again now.

Kind regards,