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deleting very old email address

ernie2009
Dialled in

hi everyone, over the past 2 hours ive spent 1 hour of it trying to get my old blueyonder email removed from my account as been hacked twice in past 6 months and now getting blackmail threats to this email after an hour on the phone i was told this old email would be removed and couldnt use it again. after an hour its still live so how long should i wait untill old email is deleted ?. 

48 REPLIES 48

after wks trying to sort this i gave up as i was told by team on here mine could not be deleted as it was connected to my account .

Not wanting to be too cynical, I persevered with my mission to get the old Blueyonder email address removed and started private messages with the forum team. After some to-ing and fro-ing to identify which account I was talking about (I only have one Blueyonder email address), I was told the matter would be passed to the IT team and “this can take up to 5 working days to be completed”.
At 2 weeks and 4 weeks I followed up and was told it was being chased up with the team. As the email account was still active at 5 weeks, I followed up again and was finally told “They have advised as this is an active Virgin Media account and this is the primary email address. We cannot delete the email address”.
On reflection, it seems to me that anyone who has a Blueyonder email address must have it as a primary account since they must have been given it as a Blueyonder customer, and then automatically have had it transferred to Virgin as their primary account when Telewest merged with Virgin in 2006.
It seems the only way I can get rid of this Blueyonder email address is to close my entire Virgin Media account and wait 90 days. I am seriously considering doing this, as I want to obliterate an email address that is a spam-magnet and constantly runs the risk, as many forum members have testified, being hacked and used to extort money or hijack Facebook and Instagram accounts etc..
It seems ludicrous that unless you quit Virgin Media you can’t change a primary email address.

Adri_G
Forum Team (Retired)
Forum Team (Retired)

Hey TamB, thanks for reaching out on our help forum and this thread.

Also for for sharing all these details on the issue, we're sorry to see your frustration in regard to this.

We'd love to best help, as the primary email account is managed by the customer have you tried to register another email you're using (or create new) and select this as your primary address for the account here? (account settings>account details>edit sign in email)

Once this is done, your blueyonder email will become a secondary address for MyVM and we could then re-raise the IT ticket to remove it.

In theory, if you were to leave us and close this active account we would remove this address automatically within 90 days of your cancellation however we'd love you to stay and we can still help with resolving this.

Please, let us know if you can make this change and we will be glad to assist further.

Adri
Forum Team

New around here? Check out the do's and don'ts, in our Community FAQs


Hi Adri,
Thanks for your concern. I wish it was as simple as you suggest. I changed my sign-in email address some time ago to myname@myowndomain.com, and this address is also the one listed under Account Details>Contact Details.
However when I visit Quick Links>Virgin Media Mail>My contact data, myname@myowndomain.com is listed as Email 2, and to the right is a red circle with a white minus sign, to allow me to delete it. The email address I want to remove from existence (*********@blueyonder.co.uk) is listed as Email 1, and is greyed out, with no way for me to delete it or change it to a secondary email (if I click on it a red border appears around its box, but nothing else happens. I am uploading a redacted screenshot.Redacted TamB Mail Account Contact Data screenshot.jpg

Graham_A
Very Insightful Person
Very Insightful Person

@TamB  The screenshot shows the contact details via the Virgin Media Mail webmail page.

The changes that Adri_G was suggesting are made via the My Virgin Media account for the email address concerned not the webmail page.

However, I am not convinced that what Adri_G has suggested is actually possible.

Unless things have changed recently setting a new sign-in username just amends the username for signing into the account, it doesn't change the underlying primary email address which would still be the blueyonder one.

________________________________
Graham

I'm a Very Insightful Person, I'm here to share knowledge, I don't work for Virgin Media, I'm a VM customer. There are no guarantees that my advice will work. Please read the FAQs
Have I helped? Click Mark as Helpful Answer or use Kudos to say thanks

Hi Graham,
As I said, I already made the changes that Adri_G was suggesting via the My Virgin Media account. You are correct that this changes the email used for logging in to MyVirginMedia and the email to be used for Virgin Media to contact me, but does not affect what is considered my ‘primary email address’ which shown as Email 1 within ‘My contact data’ on the webmail page.
I have previously been told by the forum team that ‘this is an active Virgin Media account and this is the primary email address. We cannot delete the email address.’
This is why I concluded that the only way to get rid of the email account is to close my whole Virgin Media account, and why Adri_G, not wanting to lose a long-term VM customer, suggested the well-meaning but ineffective advice.
Is it really beyond the reach of technology to fix this?
I am uploading a further-edited screenshot as the first was rejected for showing ‘personal information email addresses’. (As I pixilated all my own addresses, I can only assume the problem was showing parts of my inbox list that had headers of spam emails; I have cropped them out.) Redacted TamB Mail Account Contact Data screenshot (cropped).jpg

Graham_A
Very Insightful Person
Very Insightful Person

@TamB Thanks for your reply.  However, it doesn't change what I posted - the contact details shown in the Virgin Media Mail webmail page are irrelevant in this situation as they don't replicate the details set in the My Virgin Media account.

________________________________
Graham

I'm a Very Insightful Person, I'm here to share knowledge, I don't work for Virgin Media, I'm a VM customer. There are no guarantees that my advice will work. Please read the FAQs
Have I helped? Click Mark as Helpful Answer or use Kudos to say thanks

Hi All 👋 and particularly TamB - apologies for any confusion here. I can appreciate your concerns in wanting to delete a historic email account.

Secondary email addresses can be managed via your My Virgin media account 👉 virg.in/myVM and through webmail 👉 https://virg.in/webmail. 

If you need to delete a historic email address and are unable to do so, or have deleted it yourself via our selfcare options linked above but are still having issues or believe it is not closed, we should be able to do this for you by raising a ticket via IT. If this has already been done for you. 

Id like to investigate further what has happened here, raise a complaint if needed, and try to offer some support. I'm also going to check that the contact email address for both your services account end My VM account are up to date. 

I will send TamB a PM to confirm a few account details to confirm a few details so I can do this. You can find my PM in the top right corner of the page in your Inbox. 📩 

We can then return to this public thread with an update when possible. 

Thank you for your patience in the meantime! 🌞 All the best. 

Molly

TamB
Joining in

Update:
The ‘blueyonder’ email address has finally been deleted without me having to close my VM account!
After Molly_T contacted me in March, various strategies were suggested for me to delete it myself, but none of them were actually possible. She managed to update the address on my main services account, but this alone did not solve the problem.
I received two phone calls from IT staff giving me contradictory and inaccurate information. Eventually Molly escalated my case to a back of house team and they have convincingly terminated the email address (it is no longer accessible on the web page, and when I sent a test email I got an ‘undelivered mail’ notification).
It is now three and a half months since the first forum team member contacted me, and two months since Molly_T stepped in, but the offending email account is gone at last!
Hats off to Molly_T for persevering and finally getting a result.
It shouldn’t be such a convoluted process for VM customers, but this shows that it is not impossible.