Password for blueyonder server not recognised

[Dagsoid1]

My blueyonder email is my main email address and i am in the process of applying for jobs with it, so I am very stressed. It worked yesterday, I woke up this morning and it is not. It says my password for the server is not right. I cannot remember my password. I cannot reset it as I do not have an email address which I can access. I have no bill number as I am not a virgin customer.

I tried loads of passwords in the mail account details. In the process of that, I removed the email account to reload it so I have now also lost all the stuff that sat in my inbox until yesterday. I also changed the server port to one given on virgin's advice www to no avail. Am now thoroughly confused.

I am not a virgin customer anymore, so do not have any of their services apart from my email inbox, and cannot get help from them I tired, it is all about broadband, TV, mobile none of which I have.

[Kain_W]

Hi Dagsoid1,

Thanks for posting and welcome to the community! 

Sorry for any issues faced here, can I ask whether you have recently disconnected your old Virgin account?

Thanks,

[Dagsoid1]

Thanks for the reply. If you mean my virgin media broadband account, no, I terminated my broadband with them 18 months ago, and i had the virgin/blueyonder email before I ever had any services from them. Regarding the email account, it literally stopped working overnight, without me doing anything consciously. 

[jem101]

Use of any of the VM branded email addresses, including the BY ones, are absolutely conditional on you being a current broadband customer. Once you left some 18 months ago, the mailbox should really have been deleted 90 days later, as per the terms and conditions, now VM are not always diligent in doing this on time and sometimes (like yours) they linger on for some time. Eventually though these 'orphaned' mailboxes are caught up in a periodic cleanup process and get disabled ands eventually deleted.

I'm afraid it is just coincidence (and bad timing) that this has happened to yours just now. I don't believe, now, that VM can, even temporarily, reactive an email account once it has begun the cleanup process.

[Dagsoid1]

Disaster if that is true!!! I had the email address for the last 25 years. It did not come with my previous virgin service, I had it when it was virgin.net and was a free email address service. It the turned into blueyonder at some stage. Are you sure?

[Dagsoid1]

Gareth, I find myself in the same position, with a number of job applications of mine pending where employers will come back to me to that email address, and also all my mum's admin (she has dementia) being run from that email account. I had it from 25 years, since virgin.net days ... can you help me get it back temporarily so that I can email important people with a new address?

[jem101 · Accepted solution]

@Dagsoid1 yes, I'm afraid I am sure about this. The virgin.net addresses were never actually free, you had to either originally dial-in to the server regularly (and Virgin got a cut of the call costs) or have their later ADSL service. Both of these were withdrawn in the mid 2010's and customers advised that to keep them, they had to take up a cable broadband service with Virgin Media.

Now presumably you did this and so the addresses would have been associated with that account and when you left, the countdown timer would have been started to eventually delete them.

I'm afraid I slightly misunderstood your earlier post, when you mentioned the BlueYonder server, I assumed therefore that we were talking about an @blueyonder email address and not a legacy virgin.net one. The history of the latter is somewhat complicated and there are some circumstances in which they can be very temporarily reenabled, but the criteria are not immediately obvious.

As this thread has already been addressed by a member of the forum team, I would imagine they will revisit it in a day or so (I will escalate it for their attention if not), where they will be able to advise you definitively as to what the situation is. But I would caution you that the chances are really high that the mailbox is in the process of being deleted and can't be restored.

John

[Dagsoid1]

Thank you. My email address was a virgin.net one then changed by them to blueyonder.co.uk .
Yes please do escalate this to the forum team if they do not come back today - even if I could only have access for a couple of days, I could save quite a bit of what I need to save ... especially my Mum's stuff which is difficult to rectify as she is in a care home in Germany,and my current job application.

D.

[Graham_A]

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@Dagsoid1 wrote:

Thank you. My email address was a virgin.net one then changed by them to blueyonder.co.uk .
Yes please do escalate this to the forum team if they do not come back today - even if I could only have access for a couple of days, I could save quite a bit of what I need to save ... especially my Mum's stuff which is difficult to rectify as she is in a care home in Germany,and my current job application.

D.

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There is something not quite adding up here.  Blueyonder email addresses were used by the cable company Telewest which later merged with NTL and rebranded as Virgin Media.  No virgin.net email addresses were ever changed to blueyonder ones.

This thread has already been escalated to the the VM Forum Team.  I'm sure that @Kain_W will return to it in due course.

[jem101]

@Graham_A thanks Graham, and yes, something has gotten lost in translation here.