Your mailbox is not available at the moment - NTLworld

[CLARISSA17]

I have an NTLworld email address which I use Outlook to access.

Everything was working fine first thing this morning. I had cause later on to access my emails through webmail on the Virgin website and it said that you were doing some work on the site but that webmail was still available. I logged in to check mine and, again, all was fine.

However, later on, when I again went to check webmail, I got this message:

Your mailbox is not available at the moment.

Please retry again in one hour and make sure you are using the correct password to access your email from all of your devices.

I have tried for a number of hours since with no joy. I cannot access my emails through webmail, which keeps giving me the same above error message, nor can I access them through Outlook which flags an error message that says it cannot connect to the server and to contact you.  

There has clearly been a serious blip at your end! 

To confirm, I am a longstanding and current customer with broadband as part of my contract. 

Like many people I am trying to work from home on this email address so this is an absolute disaster plus it is the one I use for GP/hospital services all the time and I desperately need it up  and running again.

All help gratefully received! 

[coenoby · Accepted solution]

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@CLARISSA17 wrote:

All help gratefully received! 

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The *mailbox unavailable....." error is usually caused by VM locking your email account, possibly because of a potential security issue. Possibly an hacking attempt for example.

Have your tried resetting your email password? Try that from here https://my.virginmedia.com/forgot-details/password Enter your email address in the username field and follow the prompts.

That sometimes unlocks the account and saves you a lot of time. If it does not, then the best and most reliable way to get your account re-enabled is to wait here for one of the Forum Team (VM employees) who support the forum to pick up on your post. They will contact you via this thread and take your details securely via the forum's private message (PM) facility.

That will be in a day or so but they will then either resolve the issue or  if they cannot they will pass it to the appropriate IT team to get the account re-enabled.

That's a more reliable route that going via the phone lines. 😉

Coenoby

Finally, I would just add that if email is a crucial life line for you, I would respectfully suggest you move to a more reliable and secure email service. Gmail and Microsoft Outlook.com are the market leaders but there are many others.

Like you I am a longstanding VM broadband customer with an ntlworld email account. I have always been very happy with their broadband service but I have never used their email service as my main email account. In fact, the only thing I use my ntlworld email for is for communications from VM.

Also, don't forget, VM email is for VM broadband customers only. So if / when you switch to an alternative broadband provider you will lose access to your VM email accounts 90 days later.

Just something to consider perhaps

[CLARISSA17]

Thanks for the advice! I am hoping a Forum team member picks it up asap as it's the latest in a catalogue of Virgin traumas of late and I truly cannot bring myself to ring them again. I'm also reticent to do anything myself, such as resetting a password, as I'm fearful that the current issue relates to one of the previous issues and that I might make the situation even worse.  

[CLARISSA17]

I'm wondering if I messed up a little here as, as I'm new to the forum, I marked the previous reply as a helpful answer and now my query is marked as 'answered' when I'm still locked out of my account - 24 hours and counting! If a Forum team member could re-enable it I'd be very grateful. Getting increasingly desperate!

[Graham_A]

The forum team work through posts in a strict order.  They should reach this one sometime this afternoon.

[CLARISSA17]

Thanks Graham! Fingers crossed!

[Zak_M]

Good morning @CLARISSA17 

Welcome to the forum, its lovely to have you with us. 

I am sorry to hear that you have had some issues with accessing your emails. 

We can certainly get this sorted for you.  

I just wanted to pick up one one thing before I invite you into a PM. 

You said that you were reluctant to change the password as you think this could correlate to a previous issue, are you able to let me know a little more regarding the previous issue? 

Kind regards,

Zak_M

[CLARISSA17]

Hi Zak,

Thanks for coming back to me! I'm just in a meeting at the mo but briefly...

We have been customers of yours for over 20 years. We recently upgraded our package to faster broadband and more TV services. We were sent a new hub too. In the process of upgrading us we ended up with no broadband for a number of days. Since then we've been billed incorrectly and had multiple conversation with multiple people to try and correct it. The whole process has been a saga. I am therefore concerned that if various people have been making alterations to our account that they have somehow done something to my email in the process. Although, as I said in my initial post, it seems a bit of a coincidence that Virgin were making changes to the overall system and then my email suddenly wouldn't work!

Hope that helps! 

[Zak_M]

Thank you for coming back to me. 

No problem at all, whilst it dose seem a coincidence, its quite a common issue that we come across on the forums, thankfully normally we can get this resolved.

Has the package and billing been sorted? If not I can look though it all for you.

Kind regards,

Zak_M

[CLARISSA17]

Hopefully that's all been sorted now. Interestingly, mid meeting, which I've now come out of, my broadband went off briefly, no idea why? 

If you can resolve the email issue for me that would be great as I'm desperate to get at them asap.

Thanks so much for your help!