Virgin Media UK Preps Google Email Migration to Own Brand Platform

Customers of Virgin Media should keep an eye out for problems with the ISPs email service because the provider has just confirmed that, over the next few months, they’ll be migrating the current platform away from Google and onto their own service. But big email migrations rarely go smoothly.

The UK cable giant has based its email platform off Google’s service for the best part of six years, although apparently the big G “can no longer support our email service” and so Virgin Media has decided to setup their own.

The first addresses to be moved will be those assigned to the blueyonder.co.uk domain and related customers should soon receive an email to notify them about this. At present Virgin Media are naturally being optimistic and hoping that everything will go smoothly.

Virgin Media Statement

We’re moving from our old Google-based service to an all-new Virgin Media email service.

But don’t worry, all your old emails and contacts will be transferred over, safe and sound. Your email address and password will stay exactly the same, too.

In fact, if you use our webmail service, the main thing that’ll change is how the email service looks. Instead of the familiar Google layout, you’ll see our simple new Virgin Media email layout.

Sending, receiving and managing your emails on the new system will be a doddle. But it’s a good idea to get up to speed on all the changes beforehand.

Sadly there are a few small negatives to this development too, such as the loss of Google Talk (it’s not available on their new platform) and the fact that any email filters or rules you had setup will be lost (you’ll have to re-do them all). Similarly if you access any other mailboxes through your Virgin Media Mail service, such as using Mail Fetcher or POP aggregation, then you’ll need to set this all up again after the move.

Hopefully the migration will go without a hitch, although those with a long memory of this industry know only too well that any migration of such a large and complicated database is rarely problem free. Lest we not forget all the issues that plagued past migrations for ISPs such as Sky Broadband (here) and more recently BT (here).

Suffice to say that nearly all of the major email migrations of the past 5-10 years have resulted in red faces and significant customer frustration, with common problems being an inability to login, the loss of popular features, general confusion and or missing, corrupt or simply incorrect emails.