My partner and I are about to part company (stay with me on this) and I will be moving out. Our current ISP is Virgin and the account is in her name which she intends to keep. Fair enough. We have separate email addresses under the same account but my email address is one I use for my business (self employed) as well as personal stuff. All my clients have this address so I would like to know if I can keep my exact email address if I sign up to Virgin at my new home while making it inaccessible under my (ex)partner's account. It may be further complicated by the fact that it is... @ntlworld.com as I joined before Virgin took over ntl.

Seriously, setup some redirects and filters and get a different address, say gmail for example.
Of course if you insist on keeping this address then you will have to talk to Virgin media about webmail access to an account you no longer use, i.e. the broadband.

Seriously, setup some redirects and filters and get a different address, say gmail for example.
Of course if you insist on keeping this address then you will have to talk to Virgin media about webmail access to an account you no longer use, ie the broadband.

Are you saying that it is possible to set up a permanent re-direct to my new email address so that clients would not know any different ?

Redirects are not meant as a permanent solution but a means to an end to moving to a new mail structure.

For any business you should use your own domain hosting and domains can be had for under $5 a month here in the US, anything other than your own domain reflects badly o your business. That being said you need to keep personal email and business email separate a Gmail account should work for your personal email. Set up forwarders to forward email to the new address you can use this opportunity drop people you no longer want to correspond to. Send out emails to customers and friends telling them you have changed your email. Get a website up for your business on the same domain and engage social media this change has made you do something so do it right and grow your businesses web presence. Good Luck and Work Hard