We're launching our brand new Virgin Media Mail!

[BenMcr]

Virgin Media use Google Apps to run Virgin Media Mail.

There is no need for anyone's Home Address to be provided to run an e-mail service.

So VM do not give Google anyone's Home Address

I am sure that VM and Google would not have any "so called private agreements" - they would be contractual, with services defined.

[christips]

I see that the Rumour mill has been running for awhile.

http://forums.theregister.co.uk/foru...n_media_gmail/

[BenMcr]

Originally Posted by christips

I see that the Rumour mill has been running for awhile.

http://forums.theregister.co.uk/foru...n_media_gmail/

In that case pay attention to what someone has posted there:

Okay, I've had some experience of talking with Google about corporate email services. So here's what I've learned.

1: All email belongs to the recipient. Unless deleted it remains on Google's servers until the account is terminated. If the company chooses to end its agreement with Google they have 1 year to migrate data to a new provider and Google offers tools to do this.

2: Targeted advertising is an option which is usually switched OFF for corporate users. Of course they can choose to allow it for their users.

3: Data protection. Google is a party to the EU / US 'Safe Harbor' scheme which means that personal information held outside the EU is protected to the same degree as required under EC legislation.

Ben, that ties in with the contract we have with Google to supply our students with GoogleMail and Apps.

[Ignitionnet]

Originally Posted by christips

Another rumour quashed - thanks

Part of the rumour is that Google will archive your web sessions back to your mailbox using the IP address and a active Cookie for the new data retention laws on behalf of VirginMedia ?.


Last edited by christips

Google will in no way be involved in Virgin Media's compliance with data retention legislation this will be handled by dedicated hardware which will likely also be related to the Intercept Modernisation Programme.

Google will, of course, have records of what IP addresses you accessed your mailbox from, those are standard logs which all providers have. I have no idea what setting a cookie will do or how it will allow browsing habits to be tracked and legally compliant as it would require every page a subscriber visits to have something from Google embedded in it.

Dedicated hardware is required for retention of browsing history, simply setting a cookie on a website and hoping that a subscriber only visits websites where this cookie will be read is not good enough. Google Phorm, and if you can sift through all the stuff about privacy you should be able to get an idea of how such a system could work.

Google will not receive anyone's home address that is a clear and blatant violation of DPA and certainly not required for them to operate an email service. It's a ridiculous rumour to say the least. Google will not have access to people's billing information.

[BenMcr]

Just an FYI regarding the list of file types. There may be some errors in the list of what is blocked, it's being investigated as we speak

http://community.virginmedia.com/t5/...-p/19661#M2569

[Trent]

I think so many people are missing the point here its amazing.

VM are reducing my rights, my service, because a majority of customers are too bone idle to read the help documents and ensure they have sufficient antivirus..

Lets put this in a different context.. We are going to ban all religions because some people use these religions to start wars.. can you imagine what would happen if a company said that.. its no different. Also all those users who say "Rename it or compress it" Technically this is a breach of the T&C's so could get your e-mail account suspended...

Flame me all you want because I am a "savvy" user but remember that when you have to pay £200 for someone to come out and fix a driver problem that I could do for free before!

the "improvements" are not that big for me that they out shine the glaringly obvious reduction in service. I only need one e-mail account and I dont need 7gb because i download all my e-mails and dont save them to they mail server anyway!!

If vm wanted to improve the webmail service they could have done this by adding an alert everytime you try to attach or download an attachment which is risky.. but no that would be too easy.. This is simply a cost cutting measure by farming out the e-mail to Google and will it reduce the cost of my package.. not b***dy likely instead it will just make some shareholders richer...

VM score yet another own goal .. cant wait for FibreCity to start up then i will have an alternative service to consider.

[jamiefrost]

No one is forcing you to use Virgins email service, you have said you only want to use a single email address. Why don't you go and change email provider then, or setup your own email server?

At the end of the day you are complaining about something that Virgin are supplying to a great number of people as part of a service.

What you are asking for is to tailor the service to your specific need to the detriment of the majority of users.

What google have done is compromise between absolute flexibility and security of there users. The result is a limit to the functionality and less than perfect security. As with all compromises it's impossible to get a perfect solution otherwise it wouldn't be a compromise.

It sounds like the perfect solution or you would be to change to an email provider that lets you send and receive anything you want.

As for putting a warning up, never going to work in a million years. People open up unknown attachments every day when they shouldn't, and you really think a warning message is going to stop them.

How many people to you think read all of the terms of an agreement or an end user license agrement beofre the install a game or other software

[Peter_]

Originally Posted by Trent

I think so many people are missing the point here its amazing.

VM are reducing my rights, my service, because a majority of customers are too bone idle to read the help documents and ensure they have sufficient antivirus..

Lets put this in a different context.. We are going to ban all religions because some people use these religions to start wars.. can you imagine what would happen if a company said that.. its no different. Also all those users who say "Rename it or compress it" Technically this is a breach of the T&C's so could get your e-mail account suspended...

Flame me all you want because I am a "savvy" user but remember that when you have to pay £200 for someone to come out and fix a driver problem that I could do for free before!

the "improvements" are not that big for me that they out shine the glaringly obvious reduction in service. I only need one e-mail account and I dont need 7gb because i download all my e-mails and dont save them to they mail server anyway!!

If vm wanted to improve the webmail service they could have done this by adding an alert everytime you try to attach or download an attachment which is risky.. but no that would be too easy.. This is simply a cost cutting measure by farming out the e-mail to Google and will it reduce the cost of my package.. not b***dy likely instead it will just make some shareholders richer...

VM score yet another own goal .. cant wait for FibreCity to start up then i will have an alternative service to consider.

You sign up with Virgin or any other ISP then you accept their Terms and Conditions and no one is forcing you to use their email service.

You will find Googles own T & C's to none to dissimilar to Virgins but at least with Virgin you will not be inundated with advertisements.

I expect that Fibrecity will have similar T & C's unless you get a personal agreement with them.

If you do not like the idea of Virgins email being safe the try another email provider such as http://www.gmx.com/ why complain when the is always an alternative.

[Ignitionnet]

Originally Posted by Trent

I think so many people are missing the point here its amazing.

VM are reducing my rights, my service, because a majority of customers are too bone idle to read the help documents and ensure they have sufficient antivirus..

Lets put this in a different context.. We are going to ban all religions because some people use these religions to start wars.. can you imagine what would happen if a company said that.. its no different. Also all those users who say "Rename it or compress it" Technically this is a breach of the T&C's so could get your e-mail account suspended...

Flame me all you want because I am a "savvy" user but remember that when you have to pay £200 for someone to come out and fix a driver problem that I could do for free before!

the "improvements" are not that big for me that they out shine the glaringly obvious reduction in service. I only need one e-mail account and I dont need 7gb because i download all my e-mails and dont save them to they mail server anyway!!

If vm wanted to improve the webmail service they could have done this by adding an alert everytime you try to attach or download an attachment which is risky.. but no that would be too easy.. This is simply a cost cutting measure by farming out the e-mail to Google and will it reduce the cost of my package.. not b***dy likely instead it will just make some shareholders richer...

VM score yet another own goal .. cant wait for FibreCity to start up then i will have an alternative service to consider.

You evidently haven't seen the issues with the ex-Blue Yonder email platform recently, nor the problems historically with the ex-ntl one. This will provide a more stable, reliable and better service to the vast majority of users. That it may inconvenience a tiny minority who may wish to send these files is a non-issue.

It's somewhat emotive referring to VM as infringing on your 'rights' as well, don't you think?

I consider myself a fairly 'savvy' user. My primary email account is GMail and I also have my own domain with email though I generally only use it for forwarding. If I need to send a file to someone I very rarely email them I upload them to my webspace / FTP.

At the end of the day this is an extremely minor inconvenience to 'savvy' users, most of whom aren't going to be using ISP-based email anyway. It's a bad idea in many ways to do so though evidently VM's 'savvy' users go against this conventional wisdom and are happy to give themselves the inconvenience of changing their email address when they leave VM for whatever reason. Not sure how savvy that decision is.

[faze]

I use "windows mail" in windows vista to receive email to my blueyonder email account
How will this affect me?

[BenMcr]

At the moment it won't. The only thing you may have to do later on is run a small program to keep your settings up to date. Apart from that everything works the same

[faze]

Originally Posted by BenMcr

At the moment it won't. The only thing you may have to do later on is run a small program to keep your settings up to date. Apart from that everything works the same

ok ..thanks

[Stuart]

Originally Posted by Trent

I think so many people are missing the point here its amazing.


VM are reducing my rights, my service, because a majority of customers are too bone idle to read the help documents and ensure they have sufficient antivirus..

Funny that, VM putting the needs of the many before the needs of the few...

Also, if you are computer savvy, you will know that just having an antivirus program is not sufficient..

Lets put this in a different context.. We are going to ban all religions because some people use these religions to start wars.. can you imagine what would happen if a company said that.. its no different.

It's very different. You are comparing restricting someone's way of life (and religion *is* a way of life for a lot of people) with asking someone to rename or zip a file. You need some perspective.

Also all those users who say "Rename it or compress it" Technically this is a breach of the T&C's so could get your e-mail account suspended...

How on earth is that a breach of Ts&Cs? It's certainly no more of a breach of Ts&Cs than distributing copyrighted material via email (drivers are copyrighted).

Flame me all you want because I am a "savvy" user but remember that when you have to pay £200 for someone to come out and fix a driver problem that I could do for free before!

You can do it for free now...

If vm wanted to improve the webmail service they could have done this by adding an alert everytime you try to attach or download an attachment which is risky.. but no that would be too easy.. This is simply a cost cutting measure by farming out the e-mail to Google and will it reduce the cost of my package.. not b***dy likely instead it will just make some shareholders richer...

This doesn't just affect webmail, and even if it did, people can (and do) ignore alerts. You should know that if you have ever done any tech support.

Also, what's wrong with vm trying to cut costs? The shareholders are the ones who risked a lot to help VM deal with £17bn of debt..

VM score yet another own goal .. cant wait for FibreCity to start up then i will have an alternative service to consider.

There *are* other email services.

---------- Post added at 01:49 ---------- Previous post was at 01:43 ----------

Originally Posted by Moldova

I expect that Fibrecity will have similar T & C's unless you get a personal agreement with them.

As I understand it, FibreCity are not (and won't be) selling internet access direct to the end user. They will allow other ISPs to sell their bandwidth (much like BT OpenReach does).

Those ISPs will, of course, have their own Ts&Cs which, again, probably won't be too dissimilar to VMs...