Virgin.net email account closed unexpectedly

[Jeremyr2]

I have had a virgin.net email address for over 20 years.  The week before last, when on holiday I had an email saying that my Virgin.net email address would cease in 30 days and to move any important emails to another address.

7 days later I was unable to access my emails. I was not allowed to sign in. I had come back from holiday, and it was going to be one of my first jobs to move the emails, but it appears Virgin have not kept their word on the time scale.

Tried calling Virgin and just being fobbed off.

I have lost 20 years of business emails along with all personal emails.

Any answers as to how I get this account back would be appreciated.

[jpeg1]

Hopefully a VM person will pick this up and offer to help.  But hopefully you will have some form of offline backup, as is always recommended. 

[Molly_T]

Hi Jeremyr2 👋 Welcome to the community forum! Thanks for posting. 

Sorry to hear about your experience with the email service ceasing, you should receive 2 warning emails, one at 30 days and one at 14 days ahead of the service being locked. - Sincerest apologies for any inconvenience caused! 

We'd need to take a few account details to see if we can help unlock the account for you temporarily. (It is worth noting that we can't guarantee an extension of access past the 30 day period advised if you are a non-customer.) We will just need to send you a PM to confirm a few account details so we can arrange this for you.

I will do this for you now - you can find the PM in the top right corner of the page in your Inbox. 📩 We can then return to this public thread with another update when possible. Thank you for your patience in the meantime!

Wishing you all the best. 🌞

[FionaColeman]

Hi Molly,

I’m having the same problem as Jeremy2.

i did receive account closure warnings but because spammers were clearly taking advantage of the situation and were aware of account closures, they were sending out warning emails associated with McAfee, amongst others, with dubious links for payment details.

i understandably, ignored anything from then on that mentioned account closure.

This is very poor service for someone who has been with Virgin and relied on the email service for the past 20+ years. 

I have no idea how I’m going to manage now. My Virgin email is associated with everything I do as also run my own small business. I have thousands of saved emails.

[FionaColeman]

Would also like to add that my account is not dormant - it’s used every day.

[goslow]

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@FionaColeman wrote:

Would also like to add that my account is not dormant - it’s used every day.

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Are you currently a VM broadband customer?

If you are, you may wish to start your own topic. There are a lot of posts on this subject at the moment and tag-on posts to existing topics may well get missed by the VM forum team.

[FionaColeman]

I’m not.

And didn’t realise had to be after 20+ years.

To only have 30 days to sort this out after decades of use doesn’t fill me with confidence as I was looking at changing broadband supplier after my current contract is up.

if email accounts weren’t allowed to continue then they should have been terminated years ago.

There are so many warnings about phishing emails to Virgin accounts that I’m surprised two emails to account holders was the only forewarning we received amongst the spam emails about Virgin accounts.

Very poor.

[goslow]

Unfortunately, if you are not a VM broadband customer, there seems to be no further exceptions, options or extensions available to you and the mailbox will be closed based on everything I have read on here recently.

There is a very long catalogue of failure on the part of VM, and its predecessors, about how these legacy mailboxes were managed which goes back many years.

If you need to back up the mailbox, try the info in this past forum topic

https://community.virginmedia.com/t5/Forum-Archive/Backing-up-your-Emails-One-of-many-solutions/m-p/...

You should set up any new mailbox with a third party provider to avoid any future lock-in to a particular broadband provider (although ISP email seems to have gone now AFAIK).

[Adduxi]

Don’t take this the wrong way and I appreciate your concern. However if you run a business surely you should have emails backed up elsewhere? I don’t run a business but I have two sets of email backups for this very reason. As noted you should urgently get a complete backup and move your email elsewhere. I agree 30 days is very short as recent customers who leave get 90 days.