ISP Reviews by Trilby

If you're technically knowledgeable and can work around the problems, then you may still consider Virgin ADSL as a cost-effective service for high-volume usage. If, however, you need a simple, reliable and supported service, particularly email, then Virgin is not for you.

Tucows incoming POP email server for Virgin ADSL was broken again for seven hours last night from 21:50 on 06/10/08 to 04:40 on 07/10/08. When it did come back, as in the 2-day August 2008 failure, the POP UID list was broken, either temporarily or permanently, so I received a copy of several old emails I'd left on the server. I've also been having a number of other ongoing intermittent problems with Tucows incoming POP and outgoing SMTP email servers both before and after the August outage. Both incoming POP and outgoing SMTP email servers servers frequently reject connections for a variety of reasons. In the case of SMTP, both authenticated and unauthenticated connections fail, but with different errors. I've switched some of my email traffic to backup providers including Google and O2, both of whom seem to be more reliable. I do not have anything like as many problems with those providers. Virgin's email and online support desks were both completely unable to help when I contacted them some months ago. All they were able offer was basic support in configuring popular email clients, not actually solving any problems in Virgin or Tucows infrastructure. They were also unable to forward any problems to Tucows. All in all it's a consistently shoddy service from an end user's point of view. I still use Virgin ADSL because its cheap for high volume users and I'm knowledgeable enough to work around the Tucows and other problems, but I'm still deeply unimpressed.