Hi there,
I think I'm in the same situation as Mike hS and raya52. I've also had a virgin.net account for 20 years when there was no requirement to have broadband with virgin. And since 9pm last night I can't access it and get the same error message. I have never received any warning of this that the email account would close.
Please could you arrange access to my email account? If Virgin's policy has changed and they no longer allow email addresses without broadband accounts then I can move those emails to a new address but there is some very important correspondence there that I can't afford to lose.