Not so long ago, Google stopped providing their e-mail service to ISPs which forced them to look elsewhere for an alternative. As a result, Virgin Media’s new e-mail platform doesn’t have a sophisticated and accurate e-mail filtering service which resulted in many genuine messages being undelivered. Many customers have already let their displeasure known via the company’s forum. One frustrated user said:
“I’ll add a ‘me too’ to this. All my emails to ntlworld and blueyonder addresses have been rejected for some time, which is infuriating as I have clients who use these. One such client has decided to jump ship from VM because of the problem—he can’t afford to have legit email rejected.”
Virgin Media responded to this message and clarified:
“Hi All,
Apologies for the rejected email issues, if problems remain ongoing please drop me PM and I can provide contact details for our postmaster, they’ll be able to look into why these emails are being blocked for you.”
Clearly, the system is incapable of properly judging which e-mails are spam and the problems appear to be fairly widespread.
According to The Register, a Virgin Media spokesman described the situation and said:
“Since Google removed its service for ISPs from the market we’ve moved to a different email platform, meaning some emails may have not been getting through. We are helping businesses who feel their emails have been wrongly blocked.”
Doing this on a case-by-case basis isn’t ideal and only going to make customers angry while their vital business e-mails are lost. This could dramatically impact on their profit margins and nullify contracts where communication is key. Virgin Media needs to sort this out as a matter of urgency or business customers will leave in great numbers.
When they lost the email support provided by Google, Virgin Media promised “we will still automatically delete all spam before it reaches your inbox” using their “state of the art filters”. This was a blatant lie (not just a marketing statement) because they knew they had not prepared properly for this event and they lacked the in-house expertise to deliver on their promise.
Since that time in August 2015, they have made attempts to sort out a range of problems with their email platform but over 2 years later they have still not succeeded. They have asked their paying customers to “teach” the VM spam filters what is spam and what is not. I don’t recall Google, Microsoft or Yahoo asking their customers to do this!
I made an official complaint which went all the way to CEDR but VM persuaded CEDR to rule against me because “I did not respond to VM’s statement within the CEDR deadline”. In effect CEDR refused to accept that I had sent my response within the deadline. This was not, in my opinion, as the result of an email problem on VM’s platform at the time I sent the message. Instead it is likely that VM are in a position to bring influence to bear on the outcome of individual complaints to CEDR.
Recently I set Thunderbird up to forward spam to my Yahoo account and delete from my VM account. Guess what – none of these spam messages ever reach my Yahoo inbox. That puts VM’s email offering into perspective.