Virgin Media mail account outage warning

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.

21 May 2010

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been having trouble getting my e-mails through from virginmedia ever since i got a new laptop with windows 7 i have to keep going to virginmedia to check bit of a pain i tried settings at virgin and clicked on enable pop for all mail and got about 1500 e-mails through great i thought i,ve cracked it but no they were all old ones newest about a month old no new ones at all i,ve contacted virgin and a nice virgin man remotely set up my computer and said there you go all fixed waited awhile nothing next day nothing yet my wife has a seperate account on the same laptop and all hers come through i,m on the verge of ditching virgin and trying someone else

Posted by: chris 13 Oct 2010

Hi. I have an old NTL email address and recently discovered that people are not getting some of the emails I have been sending. Virgin have not given any explanation, but simply encoraged me to re-set the account page and tell me that everything will now be ok!! This has been going on for nearly a month now; and of the 5 test emails sent today to a live.co.uk address, none got through!! Yesterday Virgin promised that by re-receiving all my deleted emails for the past few months would fix the problem. Well, 9000 or so re-received and redeleted emails has not worked either.

Posted by: Soraya 26 Aug 2010

i wish to get a statement for my telephone acc.

Posted by: jamescrilly 26 May 2010

Virgin were only too happy to delete my email account without any reason. I had used it as a paying customer for a number of years and used it for business up until Virgin just switched it off. I will never use virgin again, other operators are more reliable.

Posted by: stephen 24 May 2010

i cannot acsess my email

Posted by: derek.meredith 23 May 2010

Here's a note I posted elsewhere on May 16 2010: "May 16 11:01 George Wadman I've just tried signing in to the 'new/better' Virgin email service (nothing was coming through from Virgin to my Windows Mail account). Due to the inordinate amount of time needed to log in (and to log out) to Virgin's email page, and as there were unseen emails sitting there, I phoned the help line. Very amicable response from the Virgin person BUT it turns out that the only way to get my emails is to open them on Virgin's page and to forward them to myself. One of several problems being addressed by Virgin it seems. Google?? Why would Virgin decide to link with a Company known to have its own problems with its own email system? Well...I guess other email (and Broadband) systems exist BUT I don't appreciate having to change email addresses because Virgin decided to "improve" its system without proper testing. Customer inconvenience is NOT what SERVICE is all about!" Luckily, for now, most emails seem to be getting through though I have to check the Virginmedia email direct to be sure. GW May 21 2010

Posted by: George Wadman 21 May 2010

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