Virginmedia Lost my Emails

PoGee

I had an email address where I kept my health related correspondence. It included scan reports, blood results etc etc. The address is now active, after last week's outage but all my important emails prior to the outage are still gone. Is there any chance they'll be returned?

victor2

PoGee said:

I had an email address where I kept my health related correspondence. It included scan reports, blood results etc etc. The address is now active, after last week's outage but all my important emails prior to the outage are still gone. Is there any chance they'll be returned?

Ask Virgin Media if/when they will be recovered. As of 23/6/23 they said:

Our teams are continuing to work flat out to restore historic emails into the inboxes of a small proportion of accounts

In future, keep local copies of any important emails and documents. There are endless ways such an email account can get compromised or fail and lose the contents.

Swipe

Never use an ISP for your email

TadleyBaggie

Swipe said:

Never use an ISP for your email

Or if you do, use a local client that allows local storage of important messages (e.g. Thunderbird).

PoGee

I emailed them to ask when I'll (and if) I'll get them back. I don't think I'll be seeing them again.

Bigphil1474

OP, if they do come back, get yourself a free gmail or yahoo or similar email account, and forward them on to that. (Get one anyway). You can also save emails as files, and as a final back up, print them out if they are that important. 

I use my yahoo email as my general one so get a lot of junk, but I have a gmail account which is just used for important stuff.

PoGee

It wasn't just the losing of emails but the loss of service bang on when I was communicating with my solicitor while closing the deal on buying a house. To make matters worse, I find that today I cannot send emails - I get an error message about the 'server'.

The only reason I stayed with VM for near enough 15 years was their email address provision. At the time when I first went with VM, I just used their addresses. I've been lazy in not moving from VM, as I would have had to sort out my emails as Bigphil1474 says.

I'm tied in for another year (it was a 15 month contract this time, for some reason) - can I leave mid-contract if they're not providing the service I pay for? This has been going on for 2 weeks now. Any other time would have been fine but there's points with the house purchase that need ironed out. 

ladruid

Having a quick scan through the contract (01/11/22 and 01/05/23 versions) there is no mention that Virgin Media guarantees any service level on Virgin Media email accounts. As there is no explicit mention of a contractual email service, it would be unlikely you could use loss of email service as a breach of contract and a reason to leave the contract early.

If you have a look at your contract and find it lists email as a service, you would have a case to use this as breach of contract. So check your contract you signed up with.

victor2

I don't think Virgin even offer email addresses on new accounts now, and are closing down ones they consider inactive - not used for 90 days(?).

I see the BBC are reporting on the latest outage: https://www.bbc.co.uk/news/technology-66088076

Hard to believe Virgin didn't have suitable disaster recovery mechanisms in place, but it is beginning to look that way. They might try to address the issue by allowing customers to leave their contracts penalty free, like they did for ones they imposed mid-contract price increases on, but if the contract doesn't cover email, they might just say it's not a service they were obliged to provide.

Neil_Jones

victor2 said:

I don't think Virgin even offer email addresses on new accounts now, and are closing down ones they consider inactive - not used for 90 days(?).

I see the BBC are reporting on the latest outage: https://www.bbc.co.uk/news/technology-66088076

Hard to believe Virgin didn't have suitable disaster recovery mechanisms in place, but it is beginning to look that way. They might try to address the issue by allowing customers to leave their contracts penalty free, like they did for ones they imposed mid-contract price increases on, but if the contract doesn't cover email, they might just say it's not a service they were obliged to provide.

Virgin probably don't run it.  It used to be the case that providers either farmed all that our or repackaged something else.  Google used to run Virgin email about 15 years ago, dunno if they still do.

But anyway the whole saga just goes to highlight how fickle email is.  it is not a permanent storage solution.

Detail_Merchant

Neil_Jones said:

Virgin probably don't run it.  It used to be the case that providers either farmed all that our or repackaged something else.  Google used to run Virgin email about 15 years ago, dunno if they still do.

But anyway the whole saga just goes to highlight how fickle email is.  it is not a permanent storage solution.

Virgin migrated away from Google a few years ago. I think their email platform is now based on https://en.wikipedia.org/wiki/Open-Xchange - whether they run it themselves, or pay Open-Xchange to run it, I don't know.