Many years ago I left Demon in disgust at their service and joined the cable company Telewest manly in the belief that only cable could provide decent access speeds – copper will never match fibre optic for speed. Eventually Telewest was merged with NTL to form Virgin Media the beast we now have – the latest scam is the following service reduction to email under the guise of protecting us from viruses.

As a security measure to prevent potential viruses, Virgin Media Mail doesn’t allow you to send or receive executable files (such as files ending in .exe) that could contain damaging executable code.

We also do not allow certain other types of potentially harmful files, with ending as listed here: “.ade”, “.adp”, “.bas”, “.bat”, “.chm”, “.cmd”, “.com”, “.cpl”, “.crt”, “.dll”, “.hlp”, “.hta”, “.inf”, “.ini”, “.ins”, “.isp”, “.jse”, “.lib”, “.lnk”, “.mdb”, “.mde”, “.msc”, “.msi”, “.msp”, “.mst”, “.ocx”, .pages, “.pcd”, “.pif”, “.reg”, “.scr”, “.sct”, “.shb”, “.shs”, “.sys”, “.url”, “.vb”, “.vbe”, “.vbs”, “.vxd”, “.wsc”, “.wsf” and “.wsh”.

Virgin Media Mail won’t accept these types of files even if they are sent in a zipped (.zip, .tar, .tgz, .taz, .z, .gz) format. If this type of message is sent to your Virgin Media Mail account, it is bounced back to the sender automatically.

You can send and receive messages up to 20 megabytes (MB) total (including attachments). Any message that exceeds this limit will not be delivered to your inbox and will be returned to the sender. Virgin Media.

Not only that, if you send zipped files

Virgin Media Mail allows you to send and receive zipped attachments, as long as they meet three conditions:

1. They don’t contain executable files or other potentially harmful files.
2. They are less than the maximum attachment size.
3. They are not password-protected or encrypted. Virgin Media.

Zipping up a file and password protecting it is one of the simplest methods of protecting sensitive information – not the best I agree but good enough for most people. Still you won’t be able to anymore. Is it time to find another service provider? The trouble is there isn’t an alternative cable provider; mobile internet is a slow expensive joke so if I want to change I’m going to have to get copper back, which means signing up with BT.

Oh and one other thing

We’re sure you’ll love our new, easy to use, super efficient system. And what makes it so great? Well, it’s provided by Google, of course! Virgin Media.

Not much of an advert for Google – does Gmail include the same restrictions?