Customers of Virgin Media’s broadband service, specifically those who have been migrated from their old Google (Gmail) based email platform and on to the new in-house solution (here), are being swamped by a seemingly endless mountain of junk mail (SPAM).
The blueyonder.co.uk email addresses have already been moved over to the new platform and the first ntlworld.com addresses began to be shifted on 31st August 2015, which is still on-going. But for the past few days many of those on the new platform have noticed a sudden and massive influx of SPAM (note: some have experienced it since the very first move).
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A large number of related topics on Virgin Media’s Community Forum have similarly sprung up around the issue (e.g. here, here, here and here), with each complaining that the new platform’s SPAM filtering no longer appears to be having any impact (i.e. marking the messages as SPAM and or adding custom filters does nothing).
A Brief Highlight of Customer Complaints
Hyperviper55 said:
“Today out of the blue I started to receive multiple spam emails, like over 600 of them. They are M&S or McDonald’s, Amazon or Tesco vouchers and each mail is duplicated around 35 times. I have tried filtering via spam on webmail ( and it takes ages to log in ) but nothing is working.”Preep said:
“Since the new email platform I have no control over spam. Spam box is empty. Inbox is full :(. Frustrated I spent an hour marking messages as spam, deleting and permanently deleting. And all the messages that I unsubscribed from on the old platform are back!!”Coffeegossip said:
“I have had a massive increase in spam in my alias account just in the last week or so. How do stop this other than deleting individually each incoming spam. This is extremely annoying and I trust Virgin Media will honour me with constructive answer soon.”Nleaney said:
“I’m seeing the same as everyone else – multiple (upwards of 60) spams per day offering me cheap mobile phones, Tesco and Amazon gift cards, funeral plans etc. etc. I diligently go on to Webmail (I usually use outlook) and mark them as Spam and they disappear from my inbox as expected however a few minutes later they reappear.”
At the time of writing Virgin Media has yet to officially respond to the situation, although they have privately told some customers that the anti-spam filtering is not working (obviously) and allegedly it may not be resolved until tomorrow morning. We are attempting to seek some clarification.
UPDATE 1:24pm
One of Virgin Media’s community support agents has just confirmed the problem and said, “We’re aware that some customers may be experiencing issues with their email filters and are working hard with our email provider to ensure normal service is resumed.” A dedicated forum topic has also been setup to help keep track of progress (here).
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UPDATE 3:55pm
Virgin claims to have made a change “which should stop this mail coming through” and we’re waiting to see if that helps, although some have reported that it doesn’t. However, depending upon the specifics of the change, it’s possible that it may not appear to work immediately if previously queued spam is still awaiting delivery in the system.
UPDATE 2nd October 2015
Sadly Virgin Media have not responded to our requests for comment and their community forums continue to fill up with complaints, which suggest that the problem is not resolved.
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Meanwhile some customers have found that they can stem the tide by deleting the leftover Gmail folder (you have to delete all of its sub-folders first), which seems to work despite the fact that the SPAM itself often doesn’t even end up in that folder. However some people may have important emails in those folders and so this is not the ideal solution.
UPDATE 2nd October 2015 – 12:32pm
We’ve finally had an official statement, which confirms that the problem is not resolved and is identical to what they said yesterday on the forum. A Virgin Media spokesman said: “We’re aware that some customers may be experiencing issues with their email filters and are working hard with our email provider to ensure normal service is resumed.”
A bit more information might have been nice.
UPDATE 3rd October 2015
The most recent update posted at just before 8pm last night stated that “We are making further changes which should alleviate the levels of unwanted email being received to some extent tonight, and will continue to work to get this resolved,” although the official fault report does not anticipate a full remedy until later today.
UPDATE 5th October 2015
Virgin have just put out another update to say that Friday’s changes appear to have created a “reduction in the amount of spam messages many of you are receiving“, although they still claim to be “continuing to work with the email and security teams to make sure this reduction continues, and have been passing on your concerns, feedback and examples as the investigation has gone on.”
Meanwhile some customers are now complaining that the change appears to be preventing legitimate email from getting through, often before they’ve even touched the customers anti-spam filters. So for the time being customers might be seeing less SPAM, but you could also be losing genuine email without realising it.
This situation is another prime example of why we always say that it’s better to get a dedicated email provider than use your ISP.
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