Virgin Media Community

[bobweir1]

I have reinstalled my Ntlworld email on Outlook on a new computer. Incoming email is erratic and not always complete. It works perfectly on laptop and iPhone. I have tried all the settings available on forums with no success and calling 150 and 151 is useless as the computer keeps directing you to web pages that cannot deal with the issue.

Why is Virgin Media hiding from customers?

[HowardML]

VM are not hiding from customers. VM are not responsible for set up issues for email apps/clients like Outlook. VM have a guide here for the settings you should be using which is a far as any ISP ever goes; other help available via this Forum from other VM users who use Outlook:

https://www.virginmedia.com/help/virgin-media-configure-email-settings

Check out those first. They are definitive and the settings you must use. It is fair to add that Outlook works perfectly well with VM mail and issues are usually with bad settings. 

When you say incoming mail is erratic, more details please. Do you see any error messages. Can you see your incoming mail in VM web mail when you log in at mail2.virginmedia.com?

[bobweir1]

Some messages that come into phone and laptop are missing on computer. There are no error messages. 

I can see mail on web mail pages and whilst it downloads perfectly to outlook on laptop as well as phone, it does not reliably download to new computer using the settings provided by VM

[HowardML · Accepted solution]

This is not easy. If Outlook works perfectly on your laptop and phone then it should work OK on your new PC.

Are you using IMAP or POP on your devices? And it is only IMAP that ensures that each device reflects what is happening in web mail.

[coenoby]

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@bobweir1 wrote:

it does not reliably download to new computer using the settings provided by VM

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When you marked HowardML's last post as a "Helpful post" I waited a while before posting to see if that had resolved things for you. Hopefully no news is good news.

However, if you are using the IMAP protocol but are still missing some emails there is another possibility.

It is very possible that Outlook is downloading all your emails correctly but some emails may simply not be appearing in your inbox due to a couple of less well know settings in Outlook. Check these settings out:

1) Click on the view tab and make sure that the "Show as conversations" box is unticked, When Outlook displays the inbox in conversation mode, it effectively means that emails with the  same subject from the same sender appear as one line in the Inbox.

 

In truth, it is unlikely that  this is the cause of your issue because in conversation mode once you click on an item in your inbox it becomes obvious if there are multiple emails in a single conversation. Still worth checking though. 😉

2) Click on the "View settings" cog and check that "Filter" is set to "off".

If there is a value beside "Filter" that means Outlook is applying one or more filters to your incoming emails before they are displayed in your inbox. In that case click on "Filter" and a second pop up box will display. Go through each of the 4 tabs in that box and click on "Clear all" before finally clicking on "ok". You should then return to the screen below and it should now say that the filter is "off". Any emails that were previously being filtered will now appear in your inbox.

Coenoby

[Ayisha_B]

Thanks for stepping in and helping with this as always 😄 @HowardML and @coenoby

@bobweir1 it would be great if you can check what has been suggested and let us know how you get on. 

[bobweir1]

The only way for this to work was to delete the problem account as the 'system' would not allow an update to settings. These settings appeared from somewhere when first setting up account.

Having deleted, went to instructions from Ayisha and started again. It worked immediately and continues to do so.

I remember the old days when you could dial 151 and get to speak to a tech person who could see your screen and work through the problem with you. Regrettably, the modern approach from big companies is to avoid contact (unless you want to pay for more services then there is always someone available) and direct you to an FAQ page which generally does not have the answer.

[coenoby]

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@bobweir1 wrote:

Having deleted, went to instructions from Ayisha and started again. It worked immediately and continues to do so.

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I am glad to hear that you got it sorted. As you have discovered, deleting and reinstalling the email account in Outlook and most of the other email apps often resolves a multitude of issues. In fact many experts often suggest that as the first port of call if an email app is misbehaving.

I am certainly not an apologist for Virgin Media. However,  the problem they and other ISP's have in providing "support" for email is that, as in your case many of the email issues we all get arise from the use third party email apps {such as Microsoft Outlook, IOS  Mail etc.) to manage our emails on a variety of different devices.

VM provide the necessary links in their system for the SMTP / POP3 / IMAP protocols to support those apps. What happens within those apps is completely outside VM's control. As you saw in your case, those were working fine because your other copy of Outlook was working perfectly.

To illustrate the problem,  a recent Microsoft update, effectively crippled Outlook overnight when many users, including VM customers,  discovered that the text in all their email messages had disappeared from Outlook.

VM customer services could not have been expected to know anything about that.

Thankfully MS soon corrected it. As an interesting aside to show how complex things are now, the change that Microsoft made which created that problem was not to Outlook itself but to MS Word! It seems someone in Microsoft  had forgotten that MS Outlook uses a feature from MS Word to handle the contents of an email.

Coenoby