Email Problems

Anyone having problems - nothing in overnight - not even The Register !!

Been onto the Status page and can't find any hint of problems there

Have you been swapped over to Gmail? I don't use the VM mail but certainly Gmail is working well. Maybe your account is in transition?


My register newsletter arrived OK btw but of course it goes to my own gmail address.

been G-mailed for some time - so it's not that.

I started getting things back in about 12.17 - and then they were very patchy and delayed . One from 3am [ El Reg ] appeared at 3.59pm.

It wasn't just me - someone 1 road away had problems from about 10.pm last night.

This is not the first time and last time there was nothing on the Status page either.

Browsing was fine , I got e-mail in from Mobile.me with no problem

I was trying to sort a neighbour out on Monday who couldn't get their email, ok in the morning but in the afternoon kept complaining about username/password. Sounded to me like an authentication problem at Virgin's servers. They had urgent emails to deal with before they went away late Tuesday.

When I got there she was on the phone to 'tech' support who was clearly going through a script. The person kept saying that they didn't support Outlook, only OE and Windows Mail. I pointed out that it had worked on Outlook for ages since day 1, what had they changed? She clearly didn't have technical knowledge, so they changed the password, still no joy. They then suggested I ring another number.

Before doing this I tried getting to the neighbour's email via Virgin's webmail. Straight in, no problems.

I then rang the new number and got a very helpful person.

However when I described the problem, it turned out, these people were actually to help resolve general user problems with their PC software. They did comment though that they'd had a lot of calls that day with similar email issues and also mentioned that there had been major server updates over the weekend and the technical guys were still sorting things out.

So I recommended my neighbour used web mail for the time being and that their Virgin (ntlworld.com to be exact) email issue should get sorted in a day or three.

While this doesn't sound to be the same problem as you, it may well have a common cause.

Thanks for confirming there were problems - I do wish that they would actually put it on the Server Status pages .

It was the same again this morning - but during the morning things started coming in slowly from about 10.30 .

Fortunately I do have another account I can use - but losing my main one is a right royal PITA.

I'm used to the 'authentication problem' that seems to happen regularly - though it's not been so bad recently