Although Graham’s statement above regarding the propensity of VM customer services staff to ‘simply make stuff up if not sure’, is absolutely true, this tends to be more along the lines of ‘Ok so you want xyz, err, yes absolutely we can supply that, no problem just sign up here for an 18 month contract and I guarantee that it’ll all be fine’; rather than claiming that something is actually going away.
But let’s look at the evidence; over a year ago VM stopped issuing new email addresses to new customers and stopped existing customers from creating additional email addresses - so the ‘email user base’ can only shrink.
More recently, they required existing customers who want to log into their my.virginmedia.com account to move to a non-VM branded email address to manage it going forward.
You see where this is trending towards, no?
Now let’s imagine that VM really don’t want to provide an email provision long term and so prevent new sign ups, so it’ll just wither gradually away, but this could take literally decades. Furthermore if they did want to completely dump the provision sooner rather than later, then what they need to start doing is to ‘encourage’, well force existing users to move away from a VM branded email address to manage their account - which, oddly enough is exactly what they are doing!
Furthermore, if VM were secretly planning this, then it can’t be done without rumours wandering around even to the outsourced call centres where stuff gets overheard in corridors or the canteen. Naturally, these should all be disregarded, except in this case, there is a distinct set of hints to suggest that they are heading in that direction!
Anyhow, in answer to the original question, despite the claims that ‘VM will continue to support existing email addresses’, they pointedly don’t say for how long, do they?
So, in answer to the original question as to whether VM will be dumping their email provision in the next two years, personally, I wouldn’t even give it two years, 12-18 months tops!
