Mailbox attached to husband's account disappeared and not able to access

[#1]

I have not received any emails since 7 Feb 24, although my mailbox is attached to my husband's main address and he is getting emails.  I have enquired with the Help Teams, they suggested we access the Account Management area to delete my address and set it up again. We accessed this area and it asks for your password.  However our usual 8 character password does not work, instead there appears to be 22 characters long password in its place, which we never set up.  So we can't manage the account as the Team suggests.  We've tried explaining this dilemma but they didn't understand.  After investigation they replied promptly with the same advice.

We have phoned several times to explain that it's a two facet problem.  Today I got through to someone that seemed to understand but I've got to wait a few days.

It is my mailbox that has gone and I have medical appointments and expensive medications that I'm expecting to hear about so I need access as speedily as possible.

Does anyone have any idea what might have happened?  Is there something we need to do?  Thanks for any help.

[#2]

Hi @JannyTwo I can certainly look into this for you. I'll pop you a private message as I'll need some account information from you.

[#3]

Hi @JannyTwo 

A warm welcome to the forums.

This advice rings alarm bells ... I can think of nothing quite so dire as deleting the email account and reinstating it.  It might work, but it is more likely that any email which is there will be deleted ... unless there is hand holding support through the process.

Which mail brand is this Plusnet / F9 or one of the legacy brands.

How are you attempting to access the emails?  Can you be sure that this is a matter of the account not receiving emails or your email client (for whatever reason) not being able to access them?  Have you tried looking at the mailbox using WEBMAIL?

Note that any 'representation' of a password shown in a browser screen comes from the browser not the system you are accessing.  Browsers might well mask the password by blobs for its full length so as to not hint at how long it is.

There is also this possibility ...

Reset email password

If you are not able to login to the email address using webmail, then it is likely that your email address has been identified as being compromised and has had its password changed. Where email address passwords have been changed to protect the integrity of the service, the Plusnet account password is left unchanged.

Which ISP are you with, Plusnet or one of the other / legacy vISPs?

Plusnet / Force9 / FreeOnline users can only change the password on the DEFAULT email address by changing the password on the user ACCOUNT through the user portal. You can change the password on a secondary mailbox using the Manage My Mail options in the user portal.

Brightview users (Madasafish / FreeNetName / GlobalNet / IC24 / ICScotland / Dialstart / Totalise) logging into webmail should use their full email address. Use the MAAF user portal to update the password on the default email address (change the account password) and use this MAAF guide to change the password on a secondary mailbox address. If you cannot recall the account password, you will need to contact support ... because the account password change process sends an email to the mailbox you cannot now access.

DO NOT USE THE SAME PASSWORD AGAIN for that would allow the continued exploitation of the account. The new password should be cryptic and not one used before.

Note that changing the account password will change the password used for logging on to the relevant user portal. If your email service is NOT a retained legacy service (one associated with a retired internet service account), then the password required by the router to connect to the internet will be changed too. If the router is a Hub Zero, One or Two supplied by Plusnet it should update automatically. If not, you will need to log into the router, drop the connection, change the password yourself and reconnect.

On the assumption that the email address password has been compromised, I strongly recommend that wherever you have used that email address / password combination as access credentials to services such as Amazon, Netflix, eBay etc., that you also change the passwords on those service as well.