Virgin Media UK Fixes Hyphen Conflict on Mobile Account Login
Customers of Virgin Media’s Mobile service who have a hyphen “-” in their email address (domain) have been unable to login to their online account pages for nearly two months, which began after the cable ISP made a change that caused their sign-in page to reject related addresses (email addresses act as usernames).
The hyphen sign is common in many domain names and is supported by the RFC standard. Suffice to say that many people have put a hyphen into their email addresses and until recently this was recognised without a problem by Virgin Mobile’s sign-in form. Unfortunately this appears to have changed at around the start of June 2018 and suddenly customers found that related addresses were no longer being recognised.
Several posts about the bug exist on Virgin’s Community Forum (e.g. here and here) but until recently the operator’s support staff have appeared to be uninterested in resolving it, which should be a fairly easy fix (on the surface it appears to stem from a bit of flawed verification code written in JavaScript).
Instead customers have been told to simply create a new email account (without a hyphen), which caused some to complain that the provider was “too lazy” to fix the issue itself. We have since chased Virgin Media up and a spokesperson has now informed ISPreview that it should finally be fixed sometime today, although this has yet to be confirmed.
@virginmedia Could you please fix your account login validation? It is currently not possible to login to an account using an email address that includes a hyphen even though it is perfectly valid in a domain (as long as it is not the first or last character).
— Abigail Murray (@_AbigailMurray) July 30, 2018
UPDATE 10:22am
The bug should now be fixed.
Mark is a professional technology writer, IT consultant and computer engineer from Dorset (England), he also founded ISPreview in 1999 and enjoys analysing the latest telecoms and broadband developments. Find me on X (Twitter), Mastodon, Facebook and Linkedin.
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Interesting suggestion that this is now fixed. Not only have Virgin Mobile not informed me of that fact, but on testing the login still comes up with exactly the same error message.
They said it will be fixed today. Not that it has been fixed
Sigh… few systems out there validate email addresses properly.
BT do not allow email addresses with 4 or more parts to the domain name, ie a.b.co.uk. Or rather parts of their systems do not. And despite many complaints to them, they refuse to fix it and for the past few years I have been unable to access my account with them. Just as well the only time I contact them, is when the line rental is up for renewal.
This still hasn’t been fixed. Been on with them today for a paper copy of my bills – the call center operator wanted to charge me for them – talk about rubbing salt into the wound. Very obvious that they don’t disseminate information internally, he knew nothing about this issue.