virgin.net email swindle: Tell BBC Rip Off Britain

[therevd]

For any other people affected by Virgin Media's decision to abruptly cut of virgin.net email access before they could do anything about it, please join me in submitting a complaint to the BBC programme "Rip Off Britain". If enough people complain we might just have sufficient leverage to get an adequate response from the high-handed Virgin Media staff responsible for robbing us of access to our previous emails and contact lists.

No doubt someone will tell me that I should have organised my twenty plus years of emails and contacts better but whoever made this decision should know that by and large, many the people affected are now relatively elderly and not as tech savvy as many younger folk, which meant that the time given between the email announcing the termination of the service and being denied access to their virgin.net email was only a few days and the means of achieving help from Virgin Media to find out what was happening and do something about it, so poor, was insufficient to enable us to rescue our existing emails and contact lists.

[therevd]

Ways to contact the above programme on this issue...

https://www.facebook.com/bbcripoffbritain/

RipOffBritain@bbc.co.uk

BBC Bridge House, MediaCityUK, Salford, M50 2BH

[Tudor]

This works both ways. People who have a current VM account will be ok if they contact VM. The people who do not have a VM account have been ripping off VM by having an email account for free, some for years, that the genuine VM customers are paying for.

[jpeg1]

Seems a bit pointless, when the emails will have been deleted long before any programme could be produced. 

[unisoft]

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@Tudor wrote:

This works both ways. People who have a current VM account will be ok if they contact VM. The people who do not have a VM account have been ripping off VM by having an email account for free, some for years, that the genuine VM customers are paying for.

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That's a lapse of control by VM. It should have been clear that some period after leaving all emails go, for example 90 days or 120 days after and enforced. I don't think the OP's issue is with something like that where that's upfront, it's the fact that customers and ex-customers have had email to now, and face a hurried exit from. Personally, I have never used ISP email services so I am not tied to them, but many people not technical and they trust their ISP for such a service and unless the policy is upfront and known to be enforced, they will just continue to use the service.

[therevd]

I have been paying money to Virgin in some incarnation or another since the mid-nineties, so your virtue signalling about genuine paying VM customers versus we people "ripping off VM for years" is frankly pathetic.

[therevd]

Frankly, calling out poor customer service is always worth it, irrespective of the outcome.

Otherwise things just continue to get worse.

[goslow]

The previous VM policy was instant deletion of these legacy mailboxes with no notice at all which was totally unacceptable IMO. Something must have changed for VM to prompt VM to start giving the 30 days notice in the current round of mass mailbox deletions.

A more consistent approach would have been to give mailbox users the same 90 days notice as anyone leaving VM and as per T&Cs. But 90 days would also give those users an opportunity to start raising objections and gaining publicity over the issue. So, IMO, the 30 days notice period has been deliberately chosen to give mailbox users some kind of opportunity to make the necessary changes but insufficient time to raise any objections with regulating organisations or the media.

[therevd]

I never got thirty days notice or anything close to it. First of all I couldn't sign in from my imac, then my Android phone and a few days later from my iPhone. I really didn't know what was happening at first. I initially thought it was either a spoof email message or a mistake because I assumed I was still entitled to email because of my Virgin Mobile contract and the fact that my home broadband is Virgin Media, although it is supplied by the church I work with along with my accommodation, so I am not named as the VM contract holder.

I wanted to talk with someone about this but after waiting for ages to speak to a VM online assistant, I gave up because I had a lot of work to do that could not wait. I first went on these community pages about a week ago but nobody really offered me much help. Personal messages would not talk with me because I was not the named account holder, who himself was told I could not add my current email address to the VM account in spite of me being the account user. Other information I received was incorrect. I was told I could only have had a virgin.net email if I had an associated cable account, when in fact my account dated back to the nineties and my dial-up account. I couldn't receive VM where I formerly lived because VM did not extend that far but I thought I was keeping my account alive through my Virgin Mobile account.

What makes me most upset is that I never cancelled my VM account as the email VM sent me claimed I had. It led me to believe it was sent in error and by the time the facts were made clear to me,  my account had been deleted along with more than twenty years of correspondence and contacts. I would definitely have tried to archive at least the more important ones of these and also would like to have informed current contacts about my having to change to an alternative email address. The manner in which VM acted with this gave me no such opportunity. I feel cheated and very badly treated by the way this has been handled.

[goslow · Accepted solution]

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@therevd wrote:

I never got thirty days notice or anything close to it. <snip>

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The first enquiries on here started about 3 weeks ago (the topic below was the first one I read on here)

https://community.virginmedia.com/t5/Security-matters/Email-claiming-Virgin-Media-will-close-my-acco...

Did you receive a notification within this timeframe and didn't act or was your notification much shorter? Was your mailbox deleted without notice at all perhaps just before the emails started going out?

An explanation of orphaned accounts is here

https://community.virginmedia.com/t5/Email/Orphan-Email-accounts/td-p/3492073

IMHO there is surely something significant about the change from no-notice mailbox deletion to VM suddenly starting giving out the 30 day notifications. I wonder if VM received advice on the legal/data protection aspects of deleting mailboxes before it embarked on its current large scale deletion project and was advised to start giving notification (this is nothing other than speculation on my part, of course).

In quite a few past topics (when instant deletion was in operation) I have suggested that those affected should speak to the ICO about the legal aspects of VM doing that with no notice. I can't recall anyone ever doing that and feeding back the outcome on here.

An ICO complaint normally requires you to first submit a complaint to VM and, if unresolved, ICO will take up the case. ICO timescales are measured in months (based on my own experience when I used them once in the past).

Perhaps you should give them a call and talk through what has happened and ask their advice and explain that the issue is time-critical with the 30 day limitation

https://ico.org.uk/global/contact-us/contact-us-public/

If I was making a case to the ICO it would be along the lines that VM has not reliably followed its published present-day policy of 90 day deletion and that VM has been totally inconsistent in how/when/if mailboxes are deleted in the past. This has led to confusion among users and a lack of transparency in how/when/if the policy is implemented in the past. The passage of significant amounts of time and changes in companies running the service has only added to the confusion. As a result, many users have assumed they were using a 'free' mailbox in the same way that Gmail is 'free'. VM has continued to process and store the customers' personal data so should, therefore, have a responsibility for how it is handled which includes the concept of it being handled 'fairly'. Some would now say that the 30 day notification covers this. Others may say the 30 days is insufficient time to make the necessary changes to mailboxes, contacts and services that have been in place for as much as 30 years. Why have those who may have used their mailboxes the longest been given less notification than those under the current 90 day policy?

In any case, you having nothing to lose by speaking to ICO. If nothing else you might be putting the issue onto the radar of the ICO (although as already stated above the deletions are likely to have been completed before any official response can be made).

I have no idea how the current mailbox deletion process works but, in the past, the first service to disappear used to be webmail followed by access from email client apps a little later. When I deleted my own VM mailboxes in the past they remained in a 'locked' condition for months before I had to get them finally deleted.

Whether or not you have any prospect of data recovery might depend on whether the mailbox deletion is complete to begin with or whether the account is simply locked out in some way with the data remaining and how long VM keeps the mailboxes in that condition.

What seems clear from the many topics on here about this is that, this time around, VM seems intent on closing down these legacy mailboxes with no extensions or exceptions.

Hope you manage to make some progress in some form or another even if it is just regaining access to recover data.