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Virgin Media's SPAM-AGEDDON 'fix' silences mailboxes

Ntlworld.com account holders' legit emails deep-sixed by touchy filter

Virgin Media customers who are Ntlworld.com account holders have been struggling – one way or another – to access their emails for days now.

Subscribers affected by the ISP's migration from Google's Gmail service were first forced to wade through hundreds of SPAM messages to get to their emails, only to later find that over-sensitive filters are blocking many legit missives altogether.

One unhappy punter wrote about the blunder on Virgin Media's forum on Sunday afternoon:

Valid emails are being deleted and as far as I can see they are not necessarily bounced back to the originator.

Virgin Media have cost their customers large amounts of time and money yet they don't apologise and explain how and when they will fix the problems they have created I assume this is because they haven't got the slightest clue how to rectify the situation.

As I've mentioned before, I've lost £50 on some train tickets and I can't get a validation code to get into my online bank account.

I have in the region of 50 sites I deal with that use my ntl email for validation or sending me information but I'm now having to laboriously swap them over to another email address and when that's done, bye-bye Virgin Media.

The Register has also heard from a number of readers who have complained about Virgin Media's SPAM cockup.

"In the last couple of days Virgin Media have done something to their spam filter to prevent a lot of legitimate emails from being delivered to ntlworld.com account holders," Reg reader Gary told us.

He added: "The company I work for has had over 10,000 emails rejected so far by ntlworld.com mail servers sent to 5,000 Virgin Media customers who genuinely subscribed to our alerting service."

Gary claimed that it had been "impossible" to get answers from VM's customer support staff. "I feel sorry for their customers who aren’t receiving train tickets and other critical emails," he said.

"The emails aren’t even going into their spam folders because Virgin Media mail servers are rejecting emails at the point of SMTP delivery."

El Reg asked Liberty Global-owned Virgin Media to explain what had gone wrong.

A spokesman at the telco told us: "We’re aware that some customers may be experiencing issues with their email filters and are working hard with our provider to ensure normal service is resumed."

In July, Virgin Media told subscribers that it would be shunting their emails over to an in-house system after Google confirmed that it was ditching Gmail support for ISPs.

It's not known how many legacy NTL account names remain on VM's service. Some customers retained their old @ntlworld.com addresses, which had been inherited from the days when NTL, Telewest and Virgin.net were separate companies. ®

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