Retain blueyonder email with Virgin Mobile

[cvt123]

Hi

my mother in law has a blueyonder account and is a virgin media user. She moved house and took up a BT broadband account in her new house. She didn’t realise that she would lose her blueyonder email 90 days after terminating the account. 

she has a mobile account with Virgin. If she retains that service, will the blueyonder account remain active even when she terminated the virgin broadband account?

[Graham_A]

Sadly not.  A VM broadband account is required to keep the email address.

Officially the email address should be closed permanently 90 days after the broadband account is closed.  In many cases they continue to work for varying times beyond the 90 days, however this should not be relied on.

[cvt123]

Hi

What happens to your email addresses if you move house and virgin media does not supply broadband?

I am aware that one does not retain your virgin media email addresses after 90 days from leaving them. However, if you “have to” leave because you move to a new home that does not have VM broadband, is there a way to retain the email?

[Graham_A]

@cvt123   Unfortunately the circumstances behind leaving make no difference. 

This is why it is always a good idea to have an email address provided by an email provider independent of ones internet service provider.  This way the email is portable and can be used regardless of how one obtains internet access.

[jem101]

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@cvt123 wrote:

Hi

What happens to your email addresses if you move house and virgin media does not supply broadband?

I am aware that one does not retain your virgin media email addresses after 90 days from leaving them. However, if you “have to” leave because you move to a new home that does not have VM broadband, is there a way to retain the email?

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You do make a good point, but as Graham advises above, no, without a current VM broadband account, then there is no way to reliably continue using that email address. VM don’t always execute on cleaning up old ‘orphaned’ addresses is prompt order, and some people have found that they carry on working for, sometimes, years later, giving a false sense of security. Eventually, though, they get cleaned up with no further warning.

One thing I would mention, it is always best to bear in mind that, unless you happen to own the domain name (ie the bit after the @ sign), then it is NEVER ‘your’ email address. It belongs to the domain owner (VM in this case) who ‘allow’ you to use it under certain circumstances - ie being a paying broadband customer.

This is actually true for Outlook/ Hotmail or gmail addresses to - Google, could decide tomorrow that they don’t want to be in the email business anymore and simply start the process to shutdown and delete every single gmail address in the world (they won’t - or, being Google, will they?).

Similarly, last year VM decided that they would no longer be allowing new @virginmedia.com email addresses to be created, for either new or existing customers. Is this a foretaste of them deciding to dump their email provision entirely at some point? It’s certainly possible, and if they were to decide to do this, presumably with suitable notice, then they would be entirely within their rights, as they are all their addresses.

[Vikki_M]

Hi @cvt123

Thank you for your post and welcome to our community.

I can see the community has responded and answered your concern.

As they have advised, an active broadband account is required for our email service. 

I am sorry for any inconvenience that has been caused by this.

Please do pop back to us if you have any further questions or concerns regarding this.