an email address I deleted long ago is still receiving and forwarding SPAM - how can this be ?

[cybmole]

title says it all

 I had 2 blueyonder  accounts, lets call them main and spare.

long ago, I decided I I did  not need spare, but to be sure I think I set an auto-forward of everything arriving in spare -> main

after a few months of that (not bothering to directly check spare, I could see it was really dormant , so I deleted it from accounts dashboard.

thus as at now I have only the one blueyonder, and I have that on auto forward to my gmail - I only keep it because its how VM contact me, if ever they do )

today I see 3 spam emails addressed to spare, have reached my main PC mail client..

only way to reach that is they have been auto-forwarded from blueyonder main to my gmail . the mail client only checks gmail .  so how did they make the jump form a deleted spare blueyonder account, to a MAIN one, and hence onwards to gmail ???

 it really is deleted, according to my accounts dashboard   so obviously I can;t log into it and log at email rules.

( and unhelpfully, i deleted the spam thus destroying most of the evidence rail - oops. )

can the spam have been setup so that auto-goes to the blueyonder domain, when there's no exact match for the someone@ bit, and then blueyonder was ( still is? ) configured so that anything which does not exactly match any of the aliases, gets dumped in the 1st account inbox anyway ?

i know that aliases got turned off ages ago, as a user accessible thing ) but back when you could, I recall that you could set various rules for mail addresses to aliases. could there be left over bits of active code somewhere

I just emailed myself ( as a test) from gmail to the "deleted" account to see if that got auto-forwarded back, but no.

[Travis_M]

Hi @cybmole

Thanks for posting on our community forum!

I'm going to drop you a private message to confirm some details and look into this, please keep an eye on your inbox.

Regards

[cybmole]

saw the PM , don't have all the deatails you want to hand, but I can confirm

 when I sent  a test mail to the zombie account ( which does NOT exist according to the MY accounts page) - it belatedly DID get auto forwarded,  into my gmail only mailbird client ( along sith some more spam - just arrived). its not going via rhe main blueyonder account , when i inspect the headers

 the info in 1st post was not quote right - I see that this is what I set up

 i had the account - lets call it spare@virginmedia    i replaced that with an account called spare@gmail and used an auto forward while I updated all senders 

 that's what's now  reaching my mail client. 

[cybmole]

so here's another interesting test

logged in again to my virgin media  - my accounts, manage my accounts.

 still does NOT show the zombie account as existing

 so I tried to create it, as a new account from here

Virgin Media Mail

Set up a new mailbox for yourself or someone else. The person using it can change their email address (and username) later if they want to.

 when I input the name of the zombie account I get "unavailable" ( because it exists, somewhere). i get suggestions to add a 1 to the hame, or a 2, both those are available !

so can staff just totally zap it for me please. without needing my password, account number inside leg measurements etc in order to act.

 there's no point them wanting or needing to logging into my virgin media / my accounts management as me . cos it aint there !

yet clearly it belongs to me as the autoforward I created for it still works.

i have PMd the zombie account address that needs to be killed.

[QueenAli]

Hi. I have exactly the same problem. A zombie email address that I deleted from my Virgin Media account months ago is continuing to send me spam via the VM servers. I can no longer see/access it via VM webmail and it no longer appears in my profile but I sent a test message today from another account and it arrived in my Outlook inbox. This shouldn't be happening so could someone look into it and get it deleted permanently? Thanks.

[Molly_G]

Hey @QueenAli,

Thanks for your post, sorry to hear you're having issues with the email. I'll be happy to get this through to the relevant team to request the account is removed.

I'll just send you a private message to confirm some details so please keep an eye on the purple envelope at the top of the page.

Many thanks,

[QueenAli]

Thanks for your help Molly_G. The issue is now resolved and the zombie account has been deleted.

[cybmole]

i could not be bothered with it any more, so I deleted the gmail account that the zombie account was forwarding to.

IF VM want to continue wasting their bandwidth running zombie accounts, that's their call

clearly  it is a  bug affecting multiple users

[Akua_A]

Thank you for the update @cybmole.

We further apologise that you had this experience with a zombie account. We are however glad to see you were able to resolve this issue. 

Please do not hesitate to contact us if you need any further help.

Thanks,