One email address still works, another has stopped working - what is going on?

[domx]

My mum is a Virgin Media customer and has two email addresses associated with her account. Let’s call them “A” and “B”. (There is no particular need for her having more than one address. I don’t know why these were set-up. But here we are.)

Account/address “A” works fine. She can send and receive emails through this account via Thunderbird on a PC. We can log in to the ‘My Virgin Media’ website using this email and an associated password. Sadly this is the address she would otherwise seldom use.

The other account/address, “B”, has stopped working. By this, I mean she now receives authentication error messages whenever she tries to send/receive emails involving this account/address in Thunderbird. She cannot see emails received or send emails from this account. I don’t have the exact messages, I am not able to retrieve log files.

1. Could Virgin Media have disabled/deleted the B account/address? How can we be sure? Emails sent to that address do not bounce back.
2. How can I reset the password associated with B? We do not need to reset the password associated with A. The instructions on Virgin Media’s help page are not written for people who have set-up multiple email addresses/accounts.

Thank you for any help!

[coenoby]

---

@domx wrote:

Thank you for any help!

---

Virgin Media have made many changes to their email service over the last year including the whole process of resetting passwords and I suspect that is what has confused matters for you. There are 3 big changes that you need to be aware of.

1) For quite a while every VM email address has its own "My Virgin Media" (MVM) account and so you need to sign into the MVM account for email account "B" to manage the password.

To do that enter the email address or account "B" in this link https://www.virginmedia.com/my-virgin-media and then enter the current password when prompted.

Once you have signed in click on the "Account settings" tab, then the "Account details" tab. Scroll down that page and you will see a place to edit the password.

2) You will be asked to verify the account and to do that VM now insist that you specify a non VM email account to use as the username for your VM email account.

This doesn't change the VM email address of your account but it does mean that in future you will need to enter that non VM email address when accessing the email account and MVM account on the VM website.

If your mum does not have non VM email account to use, then I'm afraid one will have to be set up. Gmail is probably the most convenient way but there are many others such as Microsoft's Outlook.com and Yahoo.com.

Once you have a non VM email account set up, enter that email address when prompted in MVM. VM will then send a verification email to that address and you just follow the instructions to change the account password. That new password will be the password you use to access the email account on the VM website. However, you need a separate password for Thunderbird.

3) VM now insist that you have to use a mail app password in the settings of your email email app (Thunderbird in your mum's case,) to access the email account.

To do that scroll down the "Accounts details" page to "Mailbox app password management." and click on "Manage".
You can then generate an app password which will be in the format:        video-post-mossy-sharp
You will then need to enter that new app password (including the "-") into the password field for that email account in Thunderbird

I'm sorry that all seems complicated. Sadly, VM have not publicised those fundamental  changes to any great extent.

Hope my explanation makes sense. Try following steps 1 - 3 and post back with how you get on.

Coenoby

[Adri_G]

Hi, domx.
Thank you for taking the time to join our help forums and create this post, a warm welcome to the VM community! 🙂

We're sorry to see this confusion and the issues faced with your mother's email accounts recently, we're glad to see that our very insightful member Coenoby above has beaten us to it and provided you with great advice.

Please, tell us if you've followed the steps above to resolve this and how things worked out, if you need more help with making these changes we'd be eager to assist further.

Best regards,