Virgin mail struggles to its feet Virgin customers have been struggling to stay in touch this week, as their email service started failing on Monday and only managed to get its act back together this morning. Quite what went wrong is still unclear, but engineers started working on the email outage on Monday night with an optimistic four-hour fix predicted. …
Seriously?
Somewhere there's a guy pulling his hair out in a datacentre and he's phoning up for some advice.
On the other end of the line is a guy with a strong Indian accent who is asking "Now sir, have you tried turning it off and waiting 20 seconds then back on again? You have? Well if you could just try it again whilst I'm on the line sir".
I gave up on using the Virgin email servers during the last fiasco, in part because I was fed up being patronised and lied to by their so-called "customer support" staff. After comapling that people trying to send me emails were receiving error messages saying that the destination SMTP server refused connections, I was told that I should be using Outlook Express in order to clear my mailbox (which wasn't full at all). Since then been using inbox.com without issue.
It all went wrong when they moved to M$ Exchange back-end...
The symptoms may be similar to the spam case a year ago - think about it though, the only thing we have to go on is that there is a mail outage. It could have been caused by anything, not just nasty spammers.
Or maybe the spammers think that everying with a Virgin email address is actually a virgin? They would have a field day showering us with guff about penis enlargement pills and wonder pheromones.
I've been a VM customer since the old C&W (I think) days - so a long time.
In the last month or two my broadband service has been bloody awful. Certain sites take ages to resolve (they won't admit DNS problems), my independent (of virgin mail services) gmail account is so slow I might as well be back on dial-up (or snail) and at random times during the day my 10mbps service drops to less than 1mbps. (Having said that phone, TV and mobile are fine).
I have rebooted all my kit - cable modem, router, pc - to no avail and all VM customer service staff say is to disable my firewall and remove my router - they can just go and fuck themselves.
I guess I might be doing something wrong, but as a long-standing system builder, coder and support-type (>2 decades) I think I have probably a better understanding of kit then their so-called service staff.
Come back blueyonder.
I have never used by Virgin account for anything, I just let Thunderbird collect the mail - and I seem to have recieved the usual amount of spam over the last few days. Which is strange considering I have never, ever, used that email address for anything - yet the spam comes in.
But when my friend phoned them up on Tuesday to complain about loss of email, she was told it was most likely a problem with the wireless settings on her router. Fantastic customer service there - deny your own fault and blame the customer.
Paris - she severed her Virgin connection years ago.
I work from home and I'm on line all day and most of the evening.
I've had problems before for one to three days at a time when I could not send emails. However, this time it started at 09:00 on the 15th July and following many calls to Customer Services and being transferred to and from Technical Support and backwards and forwards over many hours and days and, following many promises, I eventually asked for a MAC. My request was eventually agreed and that I should expect it within five days but after the five days had elapsed, on the 3rd Aug, the B......'s cut me off completely! So ... no broadband at all. And they cannot re-connect me unless I sign up for a NEW CONTRACT (Oh yeh) and then it would be about 10 days! ... Had to go and buy a slow Dongle that at least gets me on line and I'm still waiting for a response to my letter to the Virgin Customer Service MD dated 2 weeks ago but .... guess what ... nothing to date.
Not impressed with Virgin and I suggest that anyone using their trains or planes should not complain, as they might just be ejected from their "service" as I was!
I think certain clusters of email addresses have been more badly affected than others.
My wife & I share an (ex BY) cable connection through the same router but our email addresses aren't on the same cluster at their end, the outage wasn't as long for her as it was for me.
My email misbehaves on a regular basis, hers rarely does - neither of us rely on it as our main address because although the rest of the service we receive is superb with consistently fast and reliable web connections and a replacement cable-box installed within hours when one failed recently, the mailservers suck ass big-style... and always have.
Here's something to repair them with.
I have a Blueyonder account and I have had trouble accessing the blueyonder pop3 server all week. The problem has still not been sorted out to date 27th August at 23:00 GMT. It is also almost impossible to log on to the virgin/blueyonder webmail service. Access to the Virginmedia website from Brazil is also not possible. What is going on? This is not good enough.
My BY email retrieval (cable in an urban environment) was up and down (mostly down) for a few days, but a friend's virgin.net email (ADSL in a village not far away) continued OK. Now I read the Update, so that's what is was... A good system would have sent error messages when it failed to retrieve data from a disc, but it simply stopped - on one occasion it retrieved a few headers but then stopped when trying to retrieve the mail bodies.
But its not my main email ISP, although I kept the BY mailboxes and sometimes use them - but the spammers know all of them (and my mate tells me that the account name mailbox, which name I have never given anyone, is in fact public knowledge).
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