virgin.net discontinued

[eggstationzebra]

Hoping someone can help me here. Last Tuesday, my virgin.net email completely stopped working without warning. I've had it since 1999 & held onto it purely because it kept working. I've since read up on orphan accounts & it seems I've been living on borrowed time since I moved into an area not served by Virgin Media in 2017 when I switched to BT. I have just set up a gmail account but I have no access to import the vast backlog of mail/contacts etc... despite trying a password change as advised in other posts on here. Ditto forwarding for any future mail. Does anyone know if there's a way to do this? Also, I still seem to be able to send mail to that address without any bounceback, so anyone still trying to contact me won't know the address has been discontinued. Again, this is a nightmare as I'm self-employed & all my business has come through the VN address. I now know I've been naive to think it would continue, but to be given no warning at all of the cut-off seems pretty harsh, to say the least. Thanking you in advance for any help given & Virgin Media, PLEASE could you put me back on just for a short while so I can shift everything across? I can still log into my old VM account, curiously

[jem101 · Accepted solution]

@eggstationzebra I will escalate this to a member of the forum team to see what they can do, but I really must set expectations here. There is a very good chance that the mailbox is gone, or at least your access to it has gone and possibly won’t be coming back. VM will (not unjustly) point out that it was clearly stated in the Ts&Cs which you originally agreed to, that email addresses will be deleted some 90 days after you stop being a customer. Now the fact that VM have been somewhat lax in following their own policies is neither here nor there, not that it helps you in any way.

There have been cases reported here in the past, that the forum team have managed to temporarily (and I do stress ‘temporarily’) arrange for the mailbox to be made accessible again, but more recently there have been a couple of posts which suggest that there may have been a policy change (and it would have been a management decision, not by the IT staff or the forum staff here), suggesting that further requests of this nature will be rejected out of hand.

The exact criteria is a little vague, so you might be lucky, but let’s see what they say.

John

[eggstationzebra]

Thank you @jem101 I've been reading so much on here since I posted & now I fully understand what I'm up against. I did see that on the hippoemail site that is is "ok", presuming that means there's a slim chance VM could reactivate it briefly whilst I get a shift on moving everything across? Hope so. Can't see how to move the local mbox files either so it would need to be done with the gmail assistant & an active account. At least that's what I think, my brain's gone to pudding since this happened

[Sololobo]

Do/did you access your emails through an email client such as Outlook, Thunderbird or A.N.Other, or just via Webmail?

If the former, depending or whether the POP or IMAP protocol was used, there may be a possibility that your legacy emails are held on your local system.

[eggstationzebra]

Thanks Sololobo. The legacy mails are ok, got them with Apple Mail client (had IMAP btw). Main concern is getting everything across & that seems trickier if the account is dead (can't use the gmail assistant as I need access to it online & not locally). And the lack of information that the account is dead to those not in the know is more concerning still. It'll take weeks/months to get that info out to everyone

[Paul_DN]

Hi eggstationzebra,
Thank you for reaching out to us in our community and welcome, we are sorry to hear you don't have access to your Virgin.net email you have been using for over 22 Years, I will be more than happy to have a look into this, as you are no longer a customer, and we are removing these Emails I cannot promise anything, but I will indeed try.

So I can get the details from you, I will invite you into a private chat, I will send an Invite shorty, please click on the purple envelope to accept.

Regards

Paul.