Virgin and email - what are they doing?

[VnV2178B]

Ok,

I have been asked for advice from a friend (honest).

She has been with Virgin as a provider for five years or so.
She has all her internet transactions, email etc under a username.
Virgin now have disabled that username rendering it impossible for her to recover her emails over the internet on her computer.

BUT: she has an iPhone and the emails to that username are still working.

Virgin's help line advice: we can't reinstate your original usename, you have to use the new one we have given you, if you want to read your original emails you should hang on to the iphone.

This seems to be high-handed and technically inept. If the iphone still works then why not Outlook (I think she uses Outlook)?

I ask for help here because, although I am supposed to be computer literate which is why she called me, I don't know enough about the email system.
Any advice would be welcome but will need to be as simple as possible if I am to relay it to her as I am 1000 miles away, literally, and can only communicate by telephone.

VnV:confused:

[mixture]

VnV2178B,

If your description is correct and accurate, then Virgin have been serving you (sorry, your friend :cool:) the finest bull's excrement you can get.

Simple fact of the matter is that your iPhone needs to authenticate against their servers in order to retrieve emails (cf. config settings on the iPhone). No funky technical concepts to wrap your mind around here.

Therefore all they need to do is reset the password for that username and hey presto (if need be you can see the username being used in the iPhone settings, but not the password, for obvious security reasons !).

I would suggest continue pushing Virgin, escalate the call beyond the script reading monkeys.

[VnV2178B]

Thanks, Mixture.

You confirmed what I thought, my friend (honest) has spent the time since she called me and I posted the question on the phone to Virgin.

Finally, she got someone who was not a script monkey but a university undergrad earning some pennies by working as a techie. He walked her through her part and did whatever he had to do at his end and she's a happy(ish) bunny again.

So a thank you to Ryan Heatman, Virgin's techie extrordinaire.:D

(he must have the patience of a saint to have done this, she can wind me up with two words!)

I would still like to know why they did what they did, though, changing someone's email name without warning, strange.

VnV

edit: Not my iphone, her iphone ! I use a Blackberry.

[mixture]

VnV2178B,

No worries, glad it all got sorted out !

Not my iphone, her iphone ! I use a Blackberry.

Must have been a freudian slip. Probably because I've got a Blackberry and I absolutely hate it (buggy, slow, abysmal battery life.. where do I start) , might buy myself an iPhone for Christmas if nobody buys me one !