Broadband ISP Virgin Media UK closes email service and shifts users to Junara
Bad news if you’re one of broadband ISP Virgin Media’s customers who still uses their old email platform. The provider has confirmed that they’re closing their “remaining email accounts” and “transferring our email service to Junara“, which is described as being a specialist cloud-based email provider owned by Australian company Atmail.
For as long as I can recall, ISPreview has always advised our visitors not to rely upon the email services provided by your broadband provider, not least because it can make it harder for you to switch ISP (i.e. you run the risk of losing access to your address). Often, it’s far better to sign-up with one of the many free email providers (e.g. Gmail, Outlook/Hotmail) or pay a small amount for a dedicated service.
The situation with Virgin Media is sadly just another example of why it’s risky to entrust email access to your ISP. Most broadband providers stopped including email services with their packages many years ago (Virgin did this too in 2022), partly because they were no longer as popular and can be tedious/expensive to maintain. But some major providers, like Virgin, did retain them for existing users – partly due to having a modest pool of legacy users.
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According to The Register, customers who want to retain their Virgin Media email address will be invited to transfer to Junara. The first year of service will be free for current Virgin Media customers, after which they will have to pay to continue using the service. Customers will have at least 45 days from receiving their first communication to decide what action to take (these are going out in phases, starting this month).
However, Virgin are also providing an additional 120-day window to support customers who may miss the initial communications or need additional help throughout the migration process. During this period, email accounts can be recovered if necessary. If no action is taken after the 165-day window, the email account will be permanently deleted.
A spokesperson for Virgin Media said:
“As we focus and prioritize our investments and resource on ensuring our customers have the best connectivity experience, we have taken the decision to close the remaining Virgin Media email accounts. We’re transferring our email service to Junara, a specialist cloud-based email provider owned by Atmail, giving users a clear route to keep their existing Virgin Media email address if they choose to.
We are writing directly to all impacted customers to clearly explain the changes and will provide a 45-day window to either sign up with Junara, move to an alternative email provider, or close their account. To support users through this transition, all current Virgin Media customers wishing to move to Junara will receive their first year of service free of charge, with additional support available for those who need it.”
By transferring these email accounts to a specialist provider, we can focus our attention and investment on what we’re ultimately here to do – provide fast and reliable broadband, mobile, landline and TV services, and give our customers the best possible experience.”
Sadly the pricing page on Junara’s website is devoid of any actual pricing information, so we’re not sure how much this will cost after the first year. But when Manx Telecom pulled a similar move at the end of last year it cost £6.50 per month (or £65 per year), which reflected a discount on the usual price of £7.50 per month. Credits to Shaukat for the news tip.
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, BlueSky, Threads.net and Linkedin.
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BT Group also stopped offering email services to new broadband customers in 2022, with the prospect that they too may cease email service for existing customers in the coming years.
The alternative offered by BT Group, comparable to that currently provided free of charge to broadband customers, is their Premium service (multiple mail accounts, filtering and remote access) priced at GBP7.50pm. Google and Outlook are not a viable or secure service for many users, so a more expensive premium service would have to be procured.
I hope the transfer process goes more smoothly than the Plusnet email service transfer to Enix sub-brand Greenby was. That was an epic disaster for quite a few.
It took me ages to get my parents back up and running, not helped by Greenby AI support chat bots giving out plain-wrong settings info. If it wasn’t for real-human, often volunteer folks on the Plusnet forums, many of us would’ve been totally lost.
can’t begin to imagine the nightmare of having to change email addresses in 2026
I changed my main email address away from BT in 2020.
It was my Covid lockdown stay-at-home project and certainly passed the time!
I don’t know why anyone would use an ISP E-Mail these days. Don’t get me wrong, 20+ years ago having my NTLWorld E-Mail was a massive flex as I was basically broadcasting that I was lucky enough to live in a place with (what was at the time) super fast 2Mbps broadband! Nowadays, I just use my GMail for generic stuff and have my own domain name for important stuff.
Many, like myself, will have email addresses from when their ISPs started offering the service back as far as the 1990s. Those email addresses will have been used all over the place. In recent years, I have been tracking where I use the various accounts and aliases and already it would take a major effort just to migrate the set with an incomplete record of usage.
Google is not an option if you have to send or receive confidential information due to the scanning of the contents of the messages.
Years ago, we did use email services from ISPs for some reason. There are many free ones out there not linked to ISPs and for many people they are fine.
I have a domain and my email hosted by Ionos, but the package I have don’t exist now, it was a good price and still is.
Proton mail looks good, they offer offer a basic email service for free.
But most people will have email from the Google or Apple depending on what phone they have.
I still have a Yahoo and AOL accounts going. Not sure why.
That takes me back, connecting to AOL on dial up and Joanna Lumley announcing “You’ve Got Mail”.
I never had AOL in the dial up days, I did for a month in the ADSL days, but they could not get me the speed I should have had for some reason.
A mate used AOL for a while, I remember the You got mail thing. I also remember the all in one software package they used. I liked the idea of AOL, watching my mate use it, it was very community focused and he met a few people on there.
Maybe i should get the sound and use it for email on my mac. 🙂
I went to BT went I got ADSL for the simple reason that AOL wanted £35/month & BT were doing it for £30 plus I was going to use my own router rather than USB modem that was being supplied at the time.
That will be Goodby from me to Virgin Media then. The only thing that has held me back from moving to Toob for much cheaper internet has been the legacy NTLWORLD email address. As there is a suggested price of £65 a year per mailbox with Junara , that would be £130 a year for me and the wife. For anyone who took advantage of the 5 email addresses they used to allow you to set up, it would be £325 a year. The 99p transfer fee, is, I guess, a cynical attempt to get your payment details so that they can start charging automatically after the first year.
If you are remotely technical, you could rent your own domain and buy email hosting at a total yearly cost (monthly will work out more expensive) of circa £20 (2GB storage) or £30 (5GB storage) plus annual cost of your own domain name of say £7.20 (.uk) per annum, so that’s £27.20 -> £37.20 pa
For this you can create multiple mailboxes e.g. one for wife, kids, rest of the family, along with unlimited aliases (so you don’t need to disclose your “real” email address to the data harvester) The only limited factor is the amount of storage you use across the multiple mailboxes (and potentially bandwidth utilised, but realistically for email you are not going to be anywhere near the limits)
Access via webmail is using Roundcube (not a glossy experience) or the more normal clients (e.g. Thunderbird, Apple mail etc) using standard IMAP protocol.
Although I am now utilising Proton mail, I happily used Mythic Beasts email for a number of years. I have found them to be excellent. Support is via email (no phone provision) but they truly are first class – no messing around with first line support, your queries are (essentially) dealt with by 3rd line. To my eyes they are the hosting equivalent of AAISP.
Trustpilot reviews here
https://uk.trustpilot.com/review/www.mythic-beasts.com
Prices rarely change (some domains actually reduced in price) so none of this sucking you in and then screwing you aka Virgin Media. I don’t recall their hosting packages increasing in price.
If you want to separately backup your email (always good policy) have been using (free to home users) Mailstore for a number of years (Windows only)
https://www.mailstore.com/en/products/mailstore-home/
You can purchase a domain via them here
https://www.mythic-beasts.com/domains
And email hosting here
https://www.mythic-beasts.com/hosting
Help files here
Setting up a registered domain
https://www.mythic-beasts.com/support/hosting/hosted
How to configure email here
https://www.mythic-beasts.com/support/hosting/mail
I have no connection to them apart from my custom – they continue to act as my domain registrar.
Suggest you have a read first – happy to help via email if you would like assistance configuring.
Regards Alan
Ps I’m conscious the above could be construed as advertising for Mythic Beasts – Mark J, I don’t want to end up on the “naughty” step, so feel free to delete my post if its considered to gushing.
I love the fact that I am reading this on the internet but Virginmedia is yet to send any notification via email or post.
Will I be able to access historical information on my ntlworld email address even after it has been closed? I have used it for everything for over 20 years and cannot possibly export all of the data that I will need. Thanks. The ntlworld account was my parents and so I’m not even the account holder and they transferred to virgin years ago.
I would recommend that you contact the provider and ask. You should also back up all the email data to your own local storage before the migration starts.
I was happily accessing my virginmedia.com email address in my chosen web browser and all of a sudden it all goes a bit Pete Tong and all I see now is the following message:
Your Virgin Media Mail account is currently unavailable
So I log into my virgin media account, nothing about my email account being locked, but I did see the message about Junara. Cant recall seeing any emails from virgin media about moving over to Junara…
What an absolute nightmare!
My grandma used to use Tesco for her emails when she had them for broadband – then she moved to VM and repeated the same mistake.
Have started moving her over to outlook but the process takes hours if you’ve had an email address for years. Some websites such as shop use the email address as the account ID and make it a PITA to change it.
The new provider does not display any information about pricing on their website as far as I can see, there is no UK contact address and the ToS runs to 27 pages.
Ok, so Virgin is shunting their email service to an Australian company but already my emails are taking so long to reach my inbox that a lot of the offers I’m sent are already to late to take up.
Are they rooting the emails under the sea all the way to OZZ already causing a blockade in the Ocean around the Persian Gulf.
I for one will be glad to see the back of Virgin email, it has been unstable now for quite a while but when you try to contact Virgin all you get is AI chatbox which is a flipping nightmare. Don’t they employ actual Human Beings anymore.
So far it’s taken me 2 days to change my email contact details to important organisations, friends & family are easy, and I certainly not going to trust an Aussie company with my email especially after the major hack they’ve just had down there.
No information about where Juntara hosted emails will be the same as Virgin ones, or if the domains will change. Seems likely that [email protected] will become [email protected], which means contacting everyone a user has ever had contact with, including nightmarish GOV access to government level identity services. There is a risk many identities will be hacked.
No more lectures about no using email hosting from ISPs, there have just not been enough hours in the day to migrate, and the free alternatives don’t feel secure. Previous experience of one-off email accounts used for consultations being spammed by high street retailers I have never contacted suggested the free email provider was selling on my details despite opting out.