The issues I have been having with Virgin Media's email system seem to have been fixed at last, and I can now send and receive messages and access them both through the web and via an email client such as Windows Live Mail or Outlook.

As I wrote in earlier postings to this blog, the problems arose from Virgin Media's migration of customer mail accounts to a new system based on Google Mail. However, instead of the email account being unavailable for a very brief period - less than 15 minutes according to an optimistic notice on the company's web site - it was actually just over three weeks.

While I am pleased that the problem now seems to have been fixed, it took numerous phone calls between me and various people at Virgin Media, including at least one who was said to be from the chief executive's department, to resolve it, and the cause of the problem has still not been made clear.

The problem could also have been made worse by the fact that Virgin Media made a concerted effort last year to move all its customers to electronic billing, rather than receiving a paper bill sent through the post.

Like many other customers probably did, I nominated my Virgin Media account for this purpose, not imagining that the company could possibly screw up its own email service for an extended period of time.

Fortunately, this did not become a serious issue, and email seems to be up and running normally again. Hopefully, the same is true for other Virgin Media customers who found themselves in this position.

UPDATE: Virgin Media has been experiencing further email issues in March 2011. See V3.co.uk readers up in arms over Virgin Media email outage and Virgin Media email issues drag on for two weeks.

Well, I can now report that I am able to actually see the email inbox for my Virgin Media email account for the first time in nearly a fortnight, both via the web and through an email client (Windows Live Mail in this case).

Sadly, this is not the end of my problems. While I can now send emails from my account, a few test messages that I sent to myself from other accounts to make sure everything is OK have not been delivered.

One of these was returned some time later with an error report stating "451 Temporary local problem - please try later (state 14)". I will report back if I get to the bottom of this.

For those who are in the same position as me, and currently enduring having their personal email account migrated to a new system in a somewhat cack-handed and haphazard manner, I should point out that you will need to change the settings in your email client in order to access your emails.

With the move to a system based on Google Mail, email accounts are now using SSL encryption to send and receive messages. This must be enabled in the account settings for your email client, and also uses different TCP/IP port numbers for POP3, Imap and SMTP than before.

Virgin Media provides the relevant information on its website here.

UPDATE: Virgin Media has been experiencing further email issues in March 2011. See V3.co.uk readers up in arms over Virgin Media email outage and Virgin Media email issues drag on for two weeks.

Following my earlier blog on email problems at Virgin Media, I am still unable to access my personal email account, but technical support for the company has now admitted that there are issues with some customer accounts as part of the firm's switch to Google Mail.

The problem appears to affect some customers who have old-style NTL accounts - those with email addresses ending with '@ntlworld.com'.

I gleaned this information from a member of Virgin Media staff only after I escalated my support call, having grown tired of trying to get the front-line technical support staff to fix the issue.

However, the person I spoke with declined to specify the exact nature of the problem, and would only say that they have had numerous calls similar to mine, and that they are still working on it.

It also seems that Virgin Media wants customers to access their email via a browser following the switch to Google Mail, rather than use an email client program.

During my attempts to solve the email problems, I have been told several times that Windows Live Mail (Microsoft's new email client for Windows 7) is not supported by Virgin Media, despite the fact that there are explicit instructions on the company web site for configuring this, as well as other POP mail clients.

I can only assume that the company wants to drive up traffic figures for its web site, as even Google supports POP access to its webmail accounts.

FURTHER UPDATE: Virgin Media has been experiencing further email issues in March 2011. See V3.co.uk readers up in arms over Virgin Media email outage and Virgin Media email issues drag on for two weeks.

Virgin Media customers be advised - you could find yourself without access to your email account for several days sometime in the near future. The reason for the outage is that Virgin Media is in the process of migrating its domestic broadband customer email accounts to Google Mail.

However, many customers will only discover this fact when they try to access their emails and instead get an error message.

This was my experience when I opened Windows Live Mail on Wednesday, and was unable to synchronise with the POP server. An error message popped up, telling me that the server had rejected my password as incorrect.

I called Virgin Media's tech support line to find out what the problem was, and the engineer I spoke to blamed the problem on the migration of mail accounts to Google. He said that I will not be able to access my account for up to five days after reporting the problem.

I was vaguely aware that the Google Mail switchover was coming, but there was no warning from the company that this was imminent.

A note posted on the Virgin Media web site has the following information for customers:

Your mailbox will be unavailable for a very short time while you are migrated to the Google system - we can't say exactly how long in each case, but it will usually be well under 15 minutes.

We'll send you an email before we move your mailbox, and another email to welcome you to the new system once your mailbox has been moved.

Needless to say, I have received no such email, and rather than a brief 15-minute loss of service, will now not be able to access my personal emails for anything up to five days.

This is all part of the service that has made Virgin Media such a byword for customer satisfaction, of course.

So if you are a Virgin Media customer, be warned. You may wish to sign up for a webmail account, so you can at least send and receive messages if the same thing happens to you, and advise anyone you regularly exchange email correspondence with to send a copy of any messages to the backup account.

UPDATE: Virgin Media has been experiencing further email issues in March 2011. See V3.co.uk readers up in arms over Virgin Media email outage and Virgin Media email issues drag on for two weeks.