Virgin withdrawing email addresses

DCFC79

aliEnRIK wrote: »

Youve had a @virgin.net email address for 14 years? They only took over 3 years ago didnt they?

i believe before the whole virgin media thing, virgin were a small adsl isp

jrrowleyws

nibs wrote: »

This is interesting - twice today I have put in my email address only to be told that it isnt recognised. Its an ntlworld.com addy. Ive had it since launch day (cant remember what year that was - does anyone know out of interest)
I'm now thinking that I, too, might be about to lose all my emails.
I had better get everything in order incase it suddenly closes.
Thanks for the warning OP.

Virgin Media status:

You will currently be experiencing problems accessing email.. Our engineers are aware of this issue and are currently working to fix it fast. We apologise for any inconvenience this may be causing.
For updates on this ongoing issue please go to the following link: - https://www.virginmedia.com/emailaccess.

• Date Issue raised: March 24 2011, 14:10
• Estimated repair time: March 25 2011, 14:10
• Fault reference: F001554384

-Might be related?

Nilrem

Jolly_Roger wrote: »

The wiping out of old email addresses was justified to me as getting rid of addresses being used by people who were no longer customers. In other words, they had left Virgin Media, but still accessed their email addresses, which suggests that Virgin isn't all that secure anyway!
.

Why isn't it secure?

Most ISP's allow you to access their email (for receiving) from any connection if you have the password and username for it - it's the basis for which Webmail works, and is a common thing for any POP email account.

They won't however normally let you send email via their service via your email client unless you are using their connection (basic, common security procedure to cut down spam), although they will probably let you send it via their webmail log in.

After X weeks of months most ISP's will kill email accounts associated with closed ISP services, unless for example you log in via a PAYG dial up with them.
Again fairly common, and makes sense as the ISP's will be paying (all be it a small amount) to maintain email accounts belonging to ex customers.


I've yet to hear of any plans for VM to close any of their assorted email addresses for current customers, I believe they are not going to give out new ones with the old suffix's, and are suggesting people move to the virginemedia addresses but they aren't forcing us to yet.
The move to get all the various email accounts on one backend (supplied by google professional services iirc), shouldn't kill active accounts but probably will automatically purge "dead" accounts belonging to people who have left.

The change in systems is also likely to cause short term delays/inability to access accounts during the actual change (or if they run into problems), but probably lasting hours at most.

For them to be actually shutting down accounts with active customers (IE those still on the service and being billed), would require them to do a lot of advertising, and I suspect at the very least it would be hard to ignore the "we're killing this email address next week" emails, let alone the letters they would be sending out.

If you've got a customer account, and an email address linked to that account but are unable to access the email the first thing to do is to check your settings and the system status pages (IIRC the new backend may require a minor change in your email settings, but I think they've allowed both the old and new settings to work for now).


As for losing emails - never rely on just the server to keep your messages, get a half decent email client so that they can be downloaded to your local machine (you can even set it to leave a copy on the server still!), and back them up with your weekly or monthly backups - Windows Vista and 7 make it extremely simple to do, and even old versions of windows (back to 95/88) made it simple enough to backup your emails from within outlook express, and import them again if needed.

It takes about an 2 hours or so once a month for me to do a major backup of my system (everything in my docs, my pictures, etc - about 100gb), of which about 5 minutes requires me to actually be at the PC.
With windows automated backup that can take less than a minute of attended work, and a lot less time in total if you're an average user (IE use the default locations for stuff, and don't have thousands of slides etc to backup).

Jolly_Roger

Nips,
This latest destruction of email addresses seems to have been the result of a revamp of their webmail service that took place two-three days ago. They claimed they were "improving" things (and wasn't it exciting?) How is deleting archived emails "improving" anything?

soolin

None of my archived emails have been deleted, I've just checked. However I decided to delete them manually anyway as I can't see any reaosn why I would want emails from years ago.

KillerWatt

Jolly_Roger wrote: »

The wiping out of old email addresses was justified to me as getting rid of addresses being used by people who were no longer customers. In other words, they had left Virgin Media, but still accessed their email addresses, which suggests that Virgin isn't all that secure anyway!

They could only access the POP3 server, there is no way VM (or any other ISP) will let you access the SMTP server if you aren't connected to their network.

As far as getting your own mail server up & running goes, take a look at http://www.krystal.co.uk/web-hosting/
You'll obviously have to register a domain name of your choice, but once you have it then it's yours for life so you know your e-mail won't ever change again.

Completely UK based, phones answered by a real human, and a darn site more features on offer for £25 than Google are offering for £33.

I have received PM's from 2 users here who followed the above link thanking me for steering them in the direction of a painless process that took less than 30 minutes of their life from start to finish, I'll repost them here if you want to read them and verify.

blue_monkey_2

Intresting. I was looking at switching to BT or Sky for our brandband (we have no cable) so now might the time to do just that. Cannot see what we would be losing tbh.

buglawton

Anyone know of any official announcement about ntlworld mail being binned?

This will be the time to use new Gmail type email addresses and not touch the new Virgin ones. And it does make it that much easier to migrate away from Virgin in the future.

Foot, shooting, in, themselves, the (not necessarily in that order)

blue_monkey_2

Well, I've checked out Sky and they are not offering unlimited broadband around here so I guess we'll be changing to BT imminently. They have £160 cashback at the moment too. Yay.

soolin

I've had this back from Virgin when I asked them if they were axing virgin net email accounts:

Thanks for your email.

Please be informed that only email addresses of disconnected accounts would cease to work.
As per our records, your account is active and therefore there is no reason for you to get worried.
For further clarifications, please contact our Customer Services on 0845 454 2222 (Option 1) or dial 150 if you have Virgin Media phone line.
If you need any further assistance please contact us again, or visit the following address:
[URL="wlmailhtml:{CC04EAC3-7589-4DFC-B4BF-1FD1DF813154}mid://00000133/!x-usc:http://www.virgin.net/helpme/"]http://www.virgin.net/helpme/[/URL]
Many Thanks
Gowhar
Virgin Media National Support