Virgin.net email

[gymreject]

Hi,

since 29/06/23 I have lost all my @virgin.net emails. An email account I have used since virgin.net started. When virginmedia.com became the new email address VM set my virgin.net account up so I can maintain access and use of my virgin.net account. This was achieved by virgin maintaining a balance on my virgin.net account.

I have had a virgin & virgin media account continuously throughout the last 20+ years. 

I have lost access to 1000s of emails dated prior to 19/06/23. I received an email dated 19/06/23 from VM customer service sent to my virgin.net account saying there has been a technical issue. (Copy bottom of this post)

I contacted virgin media customer service yesterday to as what is the timeline for my historic emails to be reinstated. Only to be told virginmedia is not responsible for loss of emails and there is no record of my virgin.net account (even though I can connect to it online via virginmedia.com)

they also said that Talk Talk is responsible for my virgin.net email account. I have never had any type of Talk Talk account…this means I have no access for contacting Talk Talk.

what is annoying and making me angry is there is no way of talking to someone at virginmedia who for some reason does not understand (or wants to) my problems, the customer history or the ability to talk to someone in the UK.

under DPA and GDPR rules my data is supposed to be stored in a safe way yet Virgin has clearly breached this rule. Luckily GDPR has teeth when it comes to fining companies who breach data security rules and lose data through security issues or negligence. 

hopefully someone from VM will have the common sense to pass this post to VM’s legal team in light of potential GDPR breaches and loss of customer data.

Subject: Important message regarding your Virgin Media email service

Hi,

This is Virgin Media. We are getting in touch with you to provide an update in relation to your Virgin Media email service.

What has happened?

Due to a technical issue, Virgin Media email services were disrupted for most of the day on 19 June. We want to sincerely apologise for the frustration and inconvenience this may have caused you.

While our teams have been able to fully restore most email services, work is still underway to completely resolve the issue for some accounts which includes yours.

What does this mean for me?

You are now able to send and receive emails as you normally would. However, you will have noticed that any emails received on or before 19 June will not be appearing in your inbox, sent items or any other folders.

We want to reassure you that your emails and data are safe and secure; there is currently nothing to suggest your account has been compromised; and that all emails will be fully restored once the relevant system repair has been completed. Any emails sent to you on 19 June when this problem occurred, but not received, will also be delivered to your inbox once this issue has been fully fixed.

For any urgent emails you are waiting to receive, we suggest that you contact the original senders while we move all your backed up data to your mailbox.

What are you doing to fix this?

Our focus now is on working around the clock to ensure your emails are restored as quickly as possible. You do not need to take any further action and we will provide further updates as soon as we can. If you do need further assistance then our customer service teams are on hand to help wherever they can.

We appreciate your patience and understanding.

Kind regards,
The Virgin Media team

[Ilyas_Y]

Hi @gymreject 👋🏼 Thanks for reaching out to us and a warm welcome to the Virgin Media Community Forums. 

We have now restored the ability to send and receive emails for all affected accounts. Our teams are continuing to work flat out to restore historic emails into the inboxes of a small proportion of accounts. We apologise for any inconvenience caused.

Kind regards,
Ilyas.

[allanwall]

Exactly same thing has happened to me! I have had a virgin.net email address for over 30 years. 2 weeks ago I went to login and got a login error. I could not reset my password without entering a new email address so they could send a verification code. I did this but somehow this new address became my default VirginMedia login but it too hit a login error. After hours (and, in fact, days) of working my way through an automated support system setup to only deal with VirginMedia customers/account holders (which I am not), I got into a chat with someone who said they had fixed the issue and I should be able to login to my virgin.net email after 24 hours. This was not true. Still could not login. 

My virgin.net email account is my main account. I have a backup btinternet.com address which I hardly use. My wife is severely disabled. I receive important emails regarding doctor and hospital appointments for her as well as invoices for her carers; I also receive all my own health and financial related mail to my virgin address. 

Due to a medical emergency I was unable to pursue the issue for over a week, but when I resumed I hit the same problems - I could not get access to anyone who could help specifically with my virgin.net email access. Eventually I tried going through the same process as before when they said they had fixed it. I was much firmer this time but was finally rebuffed when they said they could no longer help me the virgin.net email domain was not being managed by BT (apparently this happened a couple of months ago!) and I would have to take up the issue with them!

I was quite angry at this point. How could VirginMedia do such a thing without first informing the virgin.net users? How could it be done without my noticing some change? If VirginMedia no longer wish to support the .net domain then they should at least give users the opportunity to move their data out to gmail or another provider first, not just cut them off. If I cannot get this resolved then I am seriously considering contacting the Ombudsman and also going down the GDPR route.

Can anyone help? Are there others suffering the same as me?

[allanwall]

Correction:

'they could no longer help me the virgin.net email domain was not being managed by BT' should read

'they could no longer help me the virgin.net email domain was now being managed by BT'

[Matthew_ML]

Hey allanwall, thank you for reaching out and I am so sorry to hear you having some email issues, also a warm welcome to the community.

What error are you getting when you are trying to login? 

Who has advised this email is now run by BT? 

Please provide some screenshots of the error cheers 

[ChristmasLights]

Honestly, and I’m afraid to say, the operative phrase here is, and I quote “After hours (and, in fact, days) of working my way through an automated support system setup to only deal with VirginMedia customers/account holders (which I am not),”. So you are not a VM customer, and hence aren’t paying them a single penny each month. Think about it why do you think VM should help you out at all? If they do help you, then who is paying for that support? Not you, that’ll be current VM customers. Tell me, do you believe that all current paying VM customers should pay just a little extra for your ‘free’ support?

OK, firstly, the Virgin.net is somehow to do with BT? That’s complete rubbish, as you probably know, the truth is that you, not being a current VM broadband customer, the mailbox has been disabled in preparation for deletion, but the poorly trained CS agent, when in doubt, fell back to what they were told, ie make something up and lie! You get off the phone, they chalk up another successfully closed call, everyone’s happy, no? Well, except for you, but you are just the paying customer, so who cares? Except, in your case you aren’t paying, so really, really, who cares?

Realistically, that email address is gone, you can’t access it, it’s gone. OK, your personal circumstances make that problematic, but assuming that VM’s automated (no human intervention involved), regard that all as irrelevant, what options do you have? Can you spin up alternative gmail or outlook.com address and start the, admittedly, laborious  process of moving all of your contacts to this new address?

[ChristmasLights]

---

@Matthew_ML wrote:

Hey allanwall, thank you for reaching out and I am so sorry to hear you having some email issues, also a warm welcome to the community.

What error are you getting when you are trying to login? 

Who has advised this email is now run by BT? 

Please provide some screenshots of the error cheers 

---

Seriously Matthew read the thread. A VM customer service agent (aka a member of ‘the team’), told the paying customer that their email issue was something to do with BT, now you know, and I know that this was a complete lie. In the past, the generic BS from CS (sorry, ‘the team’), was that the Virgin.net addresses were controlled by TalkTalk, it wasn’t true then and isn’t now, although the lie seems to have moved onto being a BT problem. Let’s not underestimate the lengths that VM’s offshore customer service people will lie just to get you off the phone!

Now the real question though Matthew is do you want to work for a company that allows their CS agents to do this? Because it’s been going on for quite some time, and although we see the occasional ‘we’ll feed this back’, years, literally years later and the same stuff happens!

Matthew, you are working for a company which routinely lies to its customers, you are better than that, please get your CV up to date. You’ll probably need it in the not too distant future.

[Graham_A]

Except in this case, as you mentioned in your previous post, the complainant isn't a Virgin Media customer.

[AK222]

I had the exact same issues with my ntlworld.com and virginmedia.com email addresses, around the same time.

[Ashleigh_C]

Hi there @AK222 

Thank you so much for your post and welcome back to the community forums, it's great to have you back.

I am so sorry to hear that you are facing this issue with your service and thank you so much again for posting, can I just confirm, do you have an active and current broadband account that this email is linked to?