Trying to unlock an associated email account - progress report.
Graham_A, thank you for your help.
I think you are right and if an associated email account is blocked, you can only sort it out by phoning 150. You need to know the details of both the primary and associated account holders and possibly both be present
After an interminable series of options, you eventually get through to a technician.
It may be unfair, but I suspect that the first technician we spoke to, who said it would take 7-10 days to fix the problem, did not know about email or what to do. The 7-10 days was just to get two annoying pensioners off the line.
Since there were likely to be time-sensitive emails that she could not access, we tried again after a week. This time the technician said he had fixed the problem, but it might take an hour before we could access emails. Unfortunately, whatever he did failed to work.
Yesterday we tried for a third time. This time, the technician Rahul, unblocked the email account while we waited and gave my wife a temporary password to access it. She was able to see and deal with the urgent emails. Thank you Rahul.
Ironically two of the most recent emails were fakes allegedly from Virgin saying her account had been hacked and that she needed to click on a link to resolve the problem (she didn't).
It took another 150 call today to guide us into resetting the temporary password.
A small downside of the whole business is that we can no longer log into the principal account to read emails or gmail in associated accounts.
Final comment, this seems a massive foot-shooting exercise by Virgin. Changing providers means notifying every contact and changing the login email for every website. A major disincentive to switching. But if we don't want to be locked out for days, it looks as if we will have to go through the tedious process anyway, and use email addresses from another provider.
