Unable update any My Virgin Media account settings due to an unfathomable "Verify it's you"

[werewhelk]

Hi, don't know if anyone can help.

I logged in to My Virgin Media today to perform what I thought would be the simple matter of changing my login password (just as good practice).

I'm going into Account Settings > Account Details and clicking "Edit" next to the password option, but I get the below message which seems to be wanting to force me to use a non-virgin email address to access my virgin account (???). Makes no sense to me and sounds like a world of pain, so I have gone no further.

I've tried clicking all the Edit buttons for other aspects of the account details and they all do this - including for the option to generate a new Virgin Media Mail App password, so I'm unable to update that either.

I tried talking to the support desk but they just sounded confused when I carefully talked them through what I was doing.

Can anyone shed some light on this?

Much appreciated

Tim

[Graham_A]

@werewhelk  Yes, Virgin Media now require a third party email address to be used as the username for accessing My Virgin Media and VM webmail.  This does not change the underlying email address on the way you log into the account. 

You can read more about it here: https://www.virginmedia.com/dpb/help/change-my-virgin-media-email-address

[werewhelk]

Thanks for the reply Graham. Can I just check that I've understood correctly:

So I currently have a main VM email account and also 4 secondary VM email accounts. I was previoulsy able to manage all the secondary addresses via the VM main account, but it looks like this has changed and the secondary accounts are now managed via their own logins instead of the central one.

This means I will now need to set up 5 external non-VM email accounts, one unique email for each of the 5 VM ones, with no purpose other than to regain the ability to manage the VM email settings. That's now 10 email passwords to manage instead of 5.

Is that your understanding?

I must have this wrong. Have VM never heard of 2FA via mobile phone!

Cheers, and thanks again for the link 🙂

[Graham_A]

No you haven't got it wrong that is exactly how it now works with VM emails.

[werewhelk]

It's great that for this to work, VM are 100% relying on other email providers having not adopted the same ridiculous system, which would lead to everyone needing an infinite number of email accounts!