to be horrified Virgin appear to have no back up and have lost all emails

[virginemails]

Virgin media had an outage 9 days ago and I then had 6 days without any emails or any ability to send or receive. They have now fixed ability to send and receive but any emails more than 6 days old have gone. According to twitter this affects lots of customers. No reassurance from them that they can be retrieved. In fact no communication from them at all!!

I have phoned, tweeted, whatsapped virgin daily for 8 days with automated responses or staff claiming absolutely no idea of the outages which seems unlikely. Please if anyone has any suggestions I would be very grateful.

Presumably they should have back up. Is there anyone else I can complain to about their lack of back up and non existent communication?

I have all hospital appointments, holiday bookings, car hire, flights, details of all upcoming kids activities on my emails.

In future should I have my own automatic back up of emails and in what format? I back up everything else onto hard drives and all photos onto cloud too.

How can an outage remove your emails? What domain was your email? If it was Virgin.net they've deleted all those a couple of years ago...

blueyonder. I have used same email for years and was receiving and sending hundreds of emails daily until 8 days ago. i am not technical so no idea how an outage can remove emails and why they are not backed up by virgin. is there anyone other than virigin i can ask or complain to as they have no idea. twitter is full of other upset customers with the same problem

Suppose it depends on how your email box is configured.

I could go into a long rant about IMAP and POP3 and other stuff.

But I think fundamentally emails are stored in 2 ways. One is locally on your own PC. The other is remotely on a server. If the server loses its info (not clear that it has in this case) then you lose all your emails.

The key is to move your emails that you want to keep from the remote store into a local one, then back up the local store occassionally. This is easy to do in Outlook, but my version of Outlook is state of the Ark, so I don't know how to do it in modern ones.

Thanks but shouldnt virgin have a back up system? Is there anybody I can complain to about Virgin? Are they not regulated to keep my data safe and backed up?

My DD lost her emails also. She was waiting to hear back about a job interview and isn't sure if she had an email from the employer during the days that virgin email went down. She's contacted employer but no-one knows anything (you can't speak to the recruitment team 1:1 - it's a huge corporate) so she doesn't know what's going on now! Rather irritating!

I don't think you can entirely blame this on Virgin if you've never upgraded from a blueyonder email address in the last 20 years. Get yourself a Gmail account!

Is there anyone you can complain to? Only Virgin themselves. Virgin don't even provide an email service anymore to new users, it's a legacy thing.

"Are they not regulated to keep my data safe and backed up?" - not unless it is specifically stated in your contract with them. There is no outside regulation for this.

Found some info on Virgin Media users still facing issues with emails a week after outage - DCD (datacenterdynamics.com)

It's an ongoing problem and they're apparently still in the process of restoring historical emails so you may find in the next few days that your email suddenly appears.

If the emails are lost for good, they'll sit behind the usual T&Cs that backups will be your responsibility. Unless you're specifically paying for an email service that guarantees email backups, that's the way it's always been. Email services provided as part of your internet package are generally crap.

I hope that they do manage to restore everyone's lost e-mail. For what it's worth, I find Outlook.com much better.

I have two email addresses with Virgin: one still has issues, emails missing etc, the other is fine!

It's very odd. That said, I have received communication from them about it (via email, ironically) and they said they're working on retrieving old emails still, so hopefully it'll be fixed eventually?

They've done this before. Took about a week for the old e-mails to reappear.

My DD's email account was set up with virgin 2 years ago so she's not got a 'blueyonder' account and she's been affected by the Virgin problem.

Should in the sense of would it have been good practice - yes. But the way ISPs provide services like these aren’t regulated in the way things like medical services are regulated. Ofcom are the body that oversee broadband providers, but I don’t think email and other applications are covered, only general access to the Internet. But you could try them anyway, especially if Virgin are simply not responding to your enquiries.

But don’t panic yet. Virgin may well have backed up your email. There are lots of different ways of backing up and some take more time to recover than others, especially when you’re talking about massive data stores and complex legacy systems. As PP noted, you’re not the only one in this situation and Virgin do seem to be aware they haven’t finished fixing things yet.

OP could be just as reliant on cloud storage with a gmail address.

To those saying outlook is better I was accessing and storing the emails in outlook. I only ever used emails via outlook. I had no idea I was doing anything outdated.

Should i be backing up my emails to a hard drive then if any provider could lose them. Could i set that to back up automatically as i receive them?

@Icandothis1970 thank you for this. Glad to hear it is not something I have done by not changing email. Good luck with yours.

I have a blueyonder address. I had the two day outage last week, but my e-mails are all still there.

My e-mail address is blueyonder, but the url is virginmedia.com, so I assume the mail all sits in the same place regardless of address.

One thing I did find with having an email address with a provider like Virgin or BT is that they can decide just to shut down the email provision or if you change internet provider you can't always keep the email address, I think BT at one time were charging people to keep the email if they left BT. I had an old Tesco internet address with Tesco internet and had to change it on everything and copy any emails I wanted as they were getting rid of the whole lot when it went to TalkTalk. It took ages, after that I got a Gmail address

Hopefully your emails will be recovered OP, it does look like they are still working on it.

You're confusing Microsoft Outlook (the application) with Outlook.com (the email service that used to be called Hotmail many years ago). You can use Outlook (the application) with the Outlook.com mail service (actually you can use it with pretty much every email service). A couple of pp have said they use gmail instead, it's down to preference.

"Should i be backing up my emails to a hard drive then if any provider could lose them" Yes, absolutely. It's the only way to be sure your data is safe unless your paying specifically for a service that includes backups.

You can download one of the many utilities available to automatically do the backup or you can do it manually yourself within the Outlook application (search google for "export Outlook to a PST file" for instructions)

it is very strange as my husband has blueyonder email too and none of his emails are missing and presumably we are same url, same router, location, bill etc. Feels like virgin dont have any idea who is affected

I use Outlook, and on the computer the default setting is to save emails to the computer. In android it isn't - it leaves the emails on the ISP server to save memory (the assumption being that such devices will have less available memory) and only the last 12 months of messages are displayed. So if your computer isn't saving the emails, you must have accidentally changed the default. Not a lot of help now, I know, but maybe help in the future. Nothing has ever gone seriously wrong for me, but I don't leave things to chance so anything really important is also copied to my OneDrive (or cloud storage if you use something else) - so, for example, everything to do with upcoming holidays go into a folder for that holiday, with emails, travel information, guides, everything in one folder. That way, worst case scenario is that I can access it anywhere in the world, even without my own hardware, just by finding a computer and logging in to my account.

You could do a quick and dirty backup of future important emails by forwarding them to yourself on another provider like Gmail.

The other good reason to move your email away from Virgin is that they have you over a barrel when it comes to price increases. If you need to stay with a certain ISP to keep your email address, you have zero leverage with them.

Email provided through an ISP is always going to be a secondary focus for them which ultimately loses them money, which is why this issue is happening with Virgin in the first place. Moving to another provider where email is their bread and butter is a better choice.

I stopped using BT email years ago as I wanted to leave them (and their service was terrible, it never worked). I use an icloud email address now which is safer and doesn't get the spam my gmail one does.

Probably a good time to get a new email address!

OP, set yourself up a new email account, use either Hotmail or Gmail.

I wouldn't rely on a email service from a company that don't really specialise in that side of things. Use one of the big two going forwards.

Hotmail or Gmail will have far superior recovery and failsafe systems for access, so the likelyhood of you ever having a service interruption is tiny by comparision.

I’m not very tech savvy but I’m with Virgin, all my emails have disappeared but when I logged into Live.com they are all there, not sure if this helps 🤷‍♀️