parkerhelston
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Re: Loss of Email - F010762348
It beggars belief! Like many I lost all my historic messages from before the outage of the 19th. Luckily I have backups so haven't really lost anything significant. However on several occasions VM messaged us to say they had fixed sending and receiving. OK so restoring old email (if they had a big, big, big hardware failure) might take a while. But 10 days on they still haven't restored any historic stuff. But for me the last straw is tonight when all sending and receiving has stopped again. Try reporting this to them on their own web pages and there is NO place to report anything about email at all! They had better get their act together soon or I'll be considering taking all my business away from them at the earliest opportunity. exorbitant any service. For me that's two mobile, a landline, broadband and two V6 boxes, they'll be losing income from - if they don't fix it properly very soon and make compensatory charge concessions too!1.3KViews0likes0CommentsRe: Loss of Email - F010762348
I am afraid you are all expecting Virginmedia to be responsible for restoring your lost emails. The terms and conditions for VM email use are clearly laid down in their terms and conditions and it is NOT their responsibility to back up your email, it is yourselves the customers. Its all very well if they do manage ultimately to restore your lost emails, but their Ts and Cs clearly state it is your (the customer) responsibility to backup your mail. See this cute copy pasted from their 2022 latest Tc and C's "Email use 6.4. You may or may not be offered the opportunity to sign up to a Virgin Media email account. Virgin Media email accounts are subject to availability and Virgin Media does not promise that a Virgin Media email account will be provided to you, nor does it guarantee that additional email addresses to your primary Virgin Media mailbox (if you have one) will be made available. If you use a Virgin Media email account, it is a variable service by nature and we may upgrade, update, replace or withdraw it from time to time. It is your responsibility to back up the contents of your Virgin Media email account." As you can see from the bold text (it was I who emboldened it), The onus is not on VM to backup your data - it is YOU. GDPR rehires that they have to safeguard what they have against it being stolen or leaked to external nefarious locations, but as long as that hasn't happened, they are NOT obliged to restore all your missing folders or messages. Out of they good efforts we may eventually see the return of some or all of the missing stuff, but if it doesn't happen, its still technically not their problem. I understand you are all utterly devastated by the loss of this material and the slipshod and/or lack of updates that VM have been giving us, but at the end of the day for those of us who didn't read the small print, is that VMs fault? I say we should quietly stop moaning and "wait and see". Those who don't leave VM should take the events as a salutary warning that not taking backups of your own data is a gamble which in this case may have gone badly. So . . . learn the lesson and from now on please start taking precautions to safeguard your data in future. That doesn't mean to jump ship to another free provider and continue not taking backups! Whoever you switch to can just as easily have a hardware failure and potentially lose some of your data.1.3KViews4likes4CommentsRe: Loss of Email - F010762348
Hi again NaH, You will need to leave the pst file "connected" to outlook so that it is visible inside your outlook window. If Outlook wasn't connected to the file, it wouldn't be able to copy messages to it whenever they arrive. The local PST file is NOT synched to anything, but it is merely a constantly updated copy of your inbox content. Note that once messages are present in the local PST, their disappearance from the server either accidentally or by design, will NOT result in the copy in your local backup disappearing. So your local copy remains intact regardless of whether the server also has it or has lost it 🙂1.5KViews1like1CommentRe: Loss of Email - F010762348
Hi BaH, I take it you have already created a PST file on your PC. Outlook rules act on incoming emails so you create a rule (name it according to its intended function (e.g. Backup Mail) and pick from the available Conditions a rule which applies to your specific requirement - such as "I'm the only recipient" or "To" email address is your email address) and then as the "Action" select "copy to" and browse to the folder name you created in your backing up PST file as the destination. (if you didn't create a folder inside your backup PST file already, you won't be able to select a destination - you need to have created a folder inside you back pst file first (something like "my mail copies" would do. I suggest NOT to make a folder name like "inbox" inside your backup pst as subsequenltly you may confuse the inbox in you backup with your real inbox on the server mail file. Once the folder of choice exists and your rule points to it, any and all mail arriving in your account should get copied to the local pst file from this point going forward. If you have already got messages in your inbox before the rule is created, you can manually select some or all of them and then right-click and select to copy them to you new pst folder. The rule won't act retrospective so you will need to make the manual copying of messages that existed before the rule. Good Luck 🙂1.3KViews1like3CommentsRe: Loss of Email - F010762348
Hi Jeni - its OK to switch providers for your email, but you are switching to another (albeit more reliable!) free email provider. They (Google) are similarly to VM not obligated to safeguard your data. If you are using IMAP as opposed to POP for receiving your mail (personal or business) you would be well advised to begin taking backups! The same thing could one day affect Google and you would be in the same boat with lost historic mail. Depending on the mail client you use, you may have to fiddle with it to get backups going, but essentially you can write mail "Rules" that see arriving mail and do things with it - so make a rule which makes a COPY of all incoming mail to a storage location on your own computer - this could be a backup PST file you make on your PC if you are an outlook/exchange user, or a local mailbox on you computer if you are a Mac Mail user. The rule only need to say to Make a copy of (all) messages sent to you, to your local storage. That way if the server wipes your live mailbox out, you still have a perfect local copy of all those messages right up to the point the server stopped working. If you don't do something like this you'll be snookered when such an event strikes again . . . I used to work in IT and was always paranoid about backing up so have been backing up my mail in this manner for years. Hence although VM have upset me, just like everyone else, I haven't actually lost any important mail at all.1.1KViews1like9CommentsRe: Loss of Email - F010762348
I have to agree wholeheartedly with Carl, no-one ought to be depending on a free email service for business purposes. Businesses need to be accountable to their customers (and retain records for a period of time too). I haven't tried but I bet there is no simple way to get a VM email account for business purposes - if VM know about it that is. Customers of VM for tv and broadband are on the whole private citizens and the use largely "domestic". If I was a business I wouldn't dream of using and coming to rely on any free email service. As has been printed out elsewhere we, the customers, are responsible for our own data and it's up to us to backup any important stuff. Great if VM can actually restore stuff they have lost, but as our Ts & Cs tell us, we are responsible for our own backups. If as a business you weren't taking backups of anything you need to rely on, it's on your own head. Backing up isn't rocket science and most mail clients can be given "rules" to take copies of all mail or mail from specific sources and to place those copies in a place of your own choosing (e.g. safe and sound on your own hard drive), so for those of us continuing with VM free email, a salutary lesson - "take your own backups, if you want your data to be safe". This is not just for email, either, as I know a lot of people turn on the PC use it and turn it off and don't take any precautions regarding data on its one and only hard drive. All those users are operating on borrowed time too.959Views1like0CommentsRe: Loss of Email - F010762348
Following VMs first broadcast email which came yesterday morn after they "thought" they had fixed it all, they said in that message that mail was being restored to affected accounts. I started to see my old messages appearing and was reasonably happy that all would be well. However it all fell down again. From my understanding the mail service went down big-time again and I was unable to send or receive for the rest of yesterday and it was only this morning when new mail started to come in. I checked that I could send and receive and assume its all a waiting game again for old mails to be reappearing over the next few hours. At the moment the only mail I can see is messages sent to me yesterday and today. No sign of any older messages whatsoever. After years of fairly reliable email service I am disappointed that such a big outfit is taking multiple days to restore operations. We really do want to hear what the root cause was and what is being put in place to prevent recurrence. I currently wonder if it was just a simple hardware failure, as such failures only take hours to fix by replacement (e.g. failed disk(s)) if it was a more systemic failure whereby the worlds routers could not find "our" mail servers, then it might just possibly be outside of VM/O2's control. We really need some real announcements and not the potted "we are aware" messages that VM are currently fobbing us off with. AND VM really need to sort out their website online help system. You log in and go to webmail, see a problem and click on help and opt for an online chat (about mail) and the blinking robot insist that you say whether you have a problem with your phone, mobile, broadband or TV service. No blinking mention of email - yet you were in email when you asked for help!1.4KViews3likes0Comments