Unfortunately, although what you say is correct, it doesn’t necessarily mean that the email is recoverable. If I send an email to a non-existent address, it is up to the recipient system to send a non-delivery-report (NDR), this is not automatic. So if I send an email to kldjhflkjshfjkbf@virginmedia.com, it’s up to virginmedia’s email servers whether or not they send an NDR or simply ignore it, in the latter case, from my perspective, I don’t get an NDR so therefore the mailbox is ‘live', yes?
But, in practice, there are two things to consider, the mailbox itself, the physical store on a server somewhere which receives and keeps email messages; and the security principle, or the ‘account’ which has access to that mailbox - the two are intimately tied together. In theory the two would be in lock-step, so delete the account and the mailbox should be deleted. However, remember that VM is an amalgam of two separate companies (NTL and Blueyonder), and each of those had a history of incorporating and buying up smaller companies. So, it’s not impossible to think that over time, the two components have become separated, especially in the case of the old virgin.net accounts, where the history of these can be of Byzantine complexity.
What I am saying is that it is perfectly possible that an account gets deleted (in some periodic cleanup of old accounts) but because of some oddball disconnect, the mailbox still exists and accepts email. It appears as if the email account is still there but the login account which gives access to it has gone.
Now fixing this, would require creating a new user account and associating it with the mailbox, ie assigning the correct permissions to it. Perfectly doable.
But VM might well think, ‘why should we? This person is paying us nothing, why do we dedicate resources and our tech people’s time to work for them, for no return’? And I don’t think that’s totally unreasonable!
Let’s be clear, the forum team here cannot, absolutely cannot do this. At best they can ‘raise a ticket’, and maybe, maybe, a well meaning tech might think, ‘ok I have 20 minutes free, let’s see what I can do’, and it works! Great, officially though the answer will be, ‘sorry, no, you are not a customer - jog on’.
Alas, bit of the luck of the draw as to what happens!
