Virgin Media Community

[Phil_Bt]

My @virgin.net email, which was my main email for many years cut off without a word of warning or explanation, in mid August 2020.
Yes I am a virginmedia customer, originally dial-up, then broadband from about 1998 and continuously up to the present day. 
About 8 hours on the phone to 5 different agents got nowhere. Three separate online complaints - zero response.
I've had to change the email detail on about 50 different accounts, a huge effort, but after a year I still cannot change some of them (because they need email verification from the @virgin.net account!). I still can't get into my Microsoft account for that reason.
One agent gave me access for just one day and I managed to set up fowarding - but I have no idea how many important emails (e.g. hospital appointments, insurance, pensions, tax etc) I have missed. Just today I had to chase up my car insurance - to find they had sent all the document to the virgin.net address.

[ravenstar68]

@ModTeam 

Being as the user is still a VM customer - can we check if a Move and Transfer request is still available here.

@Phil_Bt 

If the account is still live - AND the virgin.net account is registered under the same name as your broadband account, it MIGHT be possible to do a move and transfer (however I have to lay emphasis on the word MIGHT)

The drawback though is that any and all emails on the virgn.net account would overwrite any and all email addresses on your broadband account.

VM email addresses not linked to an active broadband account SHOULD close (in the case of dial up the virgin.net email should have closed 180 days after the dial up service ended back in 2013).

VM have been cleaning up orphan accounts not linked to broadband accounts.  It's one reason the recommendation around the ne is NOT to rely on ISP branded email addresses.

The Forum Team should be able to take a look for you when they get to this thread.

Tim

[Molly_G]

Hey @Phil_Bt,

Many thanks for your post and welcome to the forums. I'm very sorry to hear of the situation with your email account.

I'd like to see what we can do here and try my best to help get you back in. I'll just need to confirm some account details with you first, so please keep an eye on the purple envelope at the top of the page.

Many thanks,

[Phil_Bt]

No I haven't
The first agent told me that the server was too old to maintain, so was being shut down. Promised to set up forwarding but didn't.
Second agent just told me that I must have forgotten my password.
Third one reset it all and I got access again. I managed to set up forwarding myself. Access disappeared again after a day.
Next one told me "we don't support third party emails". I did try to point out the connection between virgin.net and virginmedia, but no.
A couple more calls but I got nowhere.
Three written complaints (online) - no replies. Also not a word about this on their website.

All this was over a year ago.

Molly had a good try a few weeks ago, but could not restore the account. (Thank you for trying)

I still have accounts that I cannot get into.  

[ravenstar68]

I do get annoyed when I hear some of the rubbish that people re told.

Virgin Media's email domains all exist on the same servers.  They've all been transferred at least twice that I know of.

1.  To Gmails servers when VM used Google Apps for ISP to deliver the email service (prior to Google closing that service).
2.  To the current system run by Ziggo internet (another of Liberty Global's partners) around 2016

I know for a fact that virgin.net was transferred at that time,  VM moved the email provision one domain at a time, starting with blueyonder.co.uk and finishing with virgin.net  So the claim that "The servers are too old to maintain." from them definitely doesn't hold water.

Likewise, no agent should promise "to set up forwarding".  Once a mailbox is closed, the address is emoved from VM's system so there's nothing to forward mail from.  The overhead in managing forwarded emails for ex customers would quickly become unweildy as the numbers grow..

However this is why the advice on the net has long been to avoid relying on ISP emails.  Precisely because the majority of ISP's have clauses in the terms and conditions warning that the email address will only remain live for as long as you are a customer.  I myself had my old blueyonder email shut down recently for this very reason (I'd had that account since Telewest days).  However I had taken the time to move my main email provision several years ago. 

Tim

[Phil_Bt]

As I have said on this forum, and to at least 10 agents, until I am blue in the face: I AM A VIRGINMEDIA BROADBAND CUSTOMER. I have been your broadband customer since 1998 (when the speed was 2Mb/s and that was pretty good at the time!), through multiple takeovers, mergers and company name changes, the latest being Virginmedia. 

[Steven_L]

My response earlier was to @cmck85 not yourself @Phil_Bt.

Are you having issues with your mailbox too @Phil_Bt, that you need me to look into further for you? 

Regards,

Steven_L

[ravenstar68]

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@Phil_Bt wrote:

As I have said on this forum, and to at least 10 agents, until I am blue in the face: I AM A VIRGINMEDIA BROADBAND CUSTOMER. I have been your broadband customer since 1998 (when the speed was 2Mb/s and that was pretty good at the time!), through multiple takeovers, mergers and company name changes, the latest being Virginmedia. 

---

I'd like to know how being as Telewest and NTL didn't launch Cable Broadband until 2000 and looking up Virgin.net and ADSL launch brings me a start date of 2002 - https://www.theregister.com/2002/07/18/virgin_net_pilots_broadband/

Virgin.net  ADSL later became the Virgin Media National (broadband down my Telephone line) service which was sold off to TalkTalk in 2015.  All virgin.net email addresses linked to ADSL accounts should have been closed at the most a year after this.  Those who were transferred to talktalk were advised that they would lose their email addresses at the time.

Virgin National customers in cabled areas SHOULD have been able to transfer to a Cable broadband account, however it was important that VM did a move and transfer of the existing email addresses on to the new account at the time you moved to cable broadband.

If the Move and Transfer never happened then your virgin.net address would have become an Orphan email in Virgin Media's system.  Such addresses have always been subject to deletion at any time.

You can use online tools to check if the address is still live: https://verifalia.com/validate-email

Tim

[Phil_Bt]

Dial-up to broadband happened around 20 years ago, sorry if I don't remember the exact date. I definitely had the virgin.net email in the dial-up days. Broadband had been available for about a year before I switch over. I have a couple of virgin.net emails in my archive dated 7/1/2000.
The validation link you sent (thank you) tells me it's a valid email. 

[jem101]

@Phil_Bt the email validation link doesn’t necessarily mean too much, only that the front end mail submission servers have accepted delivery of an inbound message without generating a non-delivery report, it’s possible, but not definite, that there is an underlaying mailbox into which the messages can be saved, the incoming email might simply be being ‘black-holed’ ie dropped without any further processing.

However as you are a current VM broadband subscriber, if the mailbox and all the mail within it hasn’t already been deleted, then as @ravenstar68 says it should be possible for it to be associated with your account, via a ‘move and transfer’ process. However there are caveats to doing so, mainly, it will irretrievably delete any and all email accounts which ARE currently associated with that broadband account.

@ForumTeam any chance of getting in touch with @Phil_Bt and seeing if this is possible before the mailbox gets purged completely?