Just as an update, after 4 phonecalls and 3 hours in total on the phone, this has finally been resolved.
To access my email now, I simply have to:
sign in using my mum's hotmail account
use my gmail details
to access my virginmedia.com emails. Simple! 😄
One representative of the team was getting frustrated with me, as they kept telling me I need to "go to google and in the search bar, type 'www.virginmedia.com'. Can you now see 'my account on the top right'?" I had to explain that of course not, I've been asked to Google a website address so I would only be seeing search results. I kept saying 'do you want me to just visit the website that you're asking me to Google and he kept saying "no, do what I tell you" and wouldn't understand that if I 'google' something, I'm going to just see a list of search results. He had to put me on hold and then call me back and then kept telling me to google "www.virginmedia.com". In the end I just went to the website... I think there must have been an error in his script... the same person was telling me that my gmail password (for you know, my gmail account) is now my password for my virginmedia email address...
To be fair, it can't be easy for VM to manage all of the amalgamated email addresses they've snowballed over the years and it's obviously become a big mess in terms of administration (NTL, Blueyonder etc).
I have learnt my lesson though and so I spent over two hours changing all my website logins to a new (non-VM!) email address that I've just set up.
It just would have been nice to have been informed of any changes, like a warning "From xx/xx/xx we won't be accepting your credentials" and then resinstate the option to manage email accounts in MyVirginMedia (instead of just one option; 'delete'...)
It's a shame, we've been customers from day one and I always stick up for VM when people complain about them. I bet they'd be laughing at me if they knew what the last week has been like haha.
My advice to anyone with an email address linked to their VM account would be - only use it for non-important logins. If you have accounts with your VM email address as the login, for things like banking, shopping, multi-factor authentication, insurance, social media, NHS, travel, subscription services, trading and of course, personal contacts - I'd recommend setting up something like protonmail or outlook, something that just has username, password and MFA. Having to use my gmail account as my username which is a sub-account of a VM account that is logged in with a hotmail account, but can't be managed from the VM account means that if something goes wrong, it really goes wrong. And again, due to the amalgamation of all these old (I say old, I only set it up a few months ago!) email addresses that were created in different times, on different databases by (then) different companies has got to be an impossible task to unify them without breaking it.
I'll never take access to emails for granted again 🙂
