Leave Virgin Media and lose your families email addresses

Dilwyn555

Hung, drawn and quartered really. I've been with Virgin since they took over our NTLWorld account in 2006. We've always been able to negotiate with retentions to get an acceptable deal, but not this year. I've paid £35 per month for 250 Mb until this month but now they want £57 per month. Local rivals LIT Fibre are offering £32 a month for 500 Mb! I've pulled out of Virgin TV and only have Broadband and VOIP (telephone plugged into their router) as Freeview, plus Prime, Netflix, and a Firestick get me all I want. I'm happy to move away from my @ntlworld.com email but my wife and daughter (own business with that email address used) are not..... so I put the prices to Virgin retentions and they can only get it to £44 per month (apparently most of the discounts they used to be able to give have been withdrawn!! Liberty Bell apparently now own them and are playing hardball. If we leave we have 90 days to clear our email accounts (after 20+ years). 

The_Unready

It always made more sense for a business (particularly) to have control over their own domain and email addresses via 3rd party hosting, so it's going to be better in the long run for your wife and daughter to bite the bullet and start transferring to a new domain/address sooner rather than later.

la531983

A proper domain name with email capabilities costs a few quid a year and looks far more professional that using a NTL World email address. 

subjecttocontract

Perhaps I've been lucky.....
I ditched the attrocious Virgin Media in March 2022 but I can still access my old emails in August 2023.

Neil_Jones

Dilwyn555 said:

Hung, drawn and quartered really. I've been with Virgin since they took over our NTLWorld account in 2006. We've always been able to negotiate with retentions to get an acceptable deal, but not this year. I've paid £35 per month for 250 Mb until this month but now they want £57 per month. Local rivals LIT Fibre are offering £32 a month for 500 Mb! I've pulled out of Virgin TV and only have Broadband and VOIP (telephone plugged into their router) as Freeview, plus Prime, Netflix, and a Firestick get me all I want. I'm happy to move away from my @ntlworld.com email but my wife and daughter (own business with that email address used) are not..... so I put the prices to Virgin retentions and they can only get it to £44 per month (apparently most of the discounts they used to be able to give have been withdrawn!! Liberty Bell apparently now own them and are playing hardball. If we leave we have 90 days to clear our email accounts (after 20+ years). 

I think you mean Liberty Global, not Liberty Bell   And they've owned Virgin since 2013 so its not a new thing.

As for the rest of your post...  Yeah the 90 day thing is documented here:

https://www.virginmedia.com/help/leaving

And email is mentioned in your T&Cs:

https://prod.ctassets.virginmedia.com/uploads/Terms_and_Conditions_TV_Fibre_and_Phone_FROM_01_MAY_2023_as_amended_21_July_2023_v2_11ec03ff26.pdf - "Any email address allocated by us to you will at all times belong to us and you may not transfer the address to any person. If this agreement [Virgin service] ends, your right to use that email address will also end and you will no longer be able to use the email address"

prowla

I dont understand the issue - are Virgin supposed to continue allowing use of addresses within their domain name and to maintain their configuraiton to support it?

As per another comment, you can buy your own domain or use a 3rd party mail service.

You can migrate your existing content (mails) across if you like.

Postik

The_Unready said:

It always made more sense for a business (particularly) to have control over their own domain and email addresses via 3rd party hosting, so it's going to be better in the long run for your wife and daughter to bite the bullet and start transferring to a new domain/address sooner rather than later.

Agreed.  It also looks more professional.  I would recommend Gmail which costs £3 - £4 per month per email account, utilising your own domain name.

prowla said:

I dont understand the issue - are Virgin supposed to continue allowing use of addresses within their domain name and to maintain their configuraiton to support it?

As per another comment, you can buy your own domain or use a 3rd party mail service.

You can migrate your existing content (mails) across if you like.

Again, agreed, but if you have 20 years of email a migration might not be that easy.

I would attempt to download a copy of the current messages to a local application such as Outlook or Thunderbird, then perhaps start with a clean slate using a service such as Gmail or MS Hosted Exchange.

As it happens, my father has exactly the same issue (not in business) with an ntlworld.com email address that he doesn't want to lose access to!