Virgin Media O2 is getting out of email. On 9 September chief operating officer Alan Stott announced that the company is transferring its mailbox service to Junara, an email provider owned by Australian firm Atmail. Four domains are affected: ntlworld.com, blueyonder.co.uk, virgin.net and virginmedia.com. The Register reported it first.
Users get three choices. They can move the mailbox to Junara, download their data and go elsewhere, or let the account close. Virgin Media is contacting customers in phases from this month. Each has at least 45 days from first notice to decide. A further 120 days follows in which a closed account can be recovered. After 165 days it is permanently deleted.
Junara is a paid service. Current Virgin Media customers get 12 months free after a 99p transfer fee, or 18 months if they are registered as needing extra support. Former customers who kept their address after leaving pay from the start. Junara has not published a price. ISPreview notes that Manx Telecom users paid £6.50 a month after a similar migration last year.
Virgin Media stopped issuing new addresses in 2022, so every mailbox in scope is at least four years old. Many date from the NTL and Blueyonder cable era. The company has not said how many are active.
What it means for senders
These are long-tenure UK consumer addresses, widely used as logins and billing contacts. Any B2C list with UK history holds them.
Attrition will come in two waves. The first starts in late October, when the earliest 45-day windows expire, and runs through peak season as later phases follow. The second arrives a year on, when free periods end and the first charge lands. A service that asks for card details to keep a once-free address will lose users at each step.
The bounce behaviour is unknown. Virgin Media has not said whether mail to an account in its 120-day recovery window is rejected, or accepted and held. If it is accepted, senders get no signal until permanent deletion, which for the first cohort falls in late February. Until then, engagement data on the four domains is the only early warning.
The receiving infrastructure changes too. Mail for migrated users will be handled by Atmail’s platform with its own filtering, and senders should assume reputation does not carry over. Neither company has published MX cutover dates, postmaster contacts or feedback loop arrangements.
The practical step is to act while the mailboxes still work. Segment the four domains. Ask those subscribers to confirm or update their address now, and make it easy to do in account settings. Anyone who uses the address as a login and loses it also loses password reset.
That campaign needs care. Virgin Media says its own migration notices will carry no clickable sign-up links and will direct customers to its website, because it expects phishers to imitate them. These users are about to be told to distrust emails asking them to change account details. Keep the message plain, send from your usual domain, and link only to your own logged-in account page.
Access providers have been retreating from mailbox hosting for years. Yahoo took on Comcast’s subscriber mailboxes in 2025. Virgin Media O2’s shareholders are reportedly seeking £600m in cost cuts.
