I asked virgin.net to close my "pay as you go" webmail account when I switched to their broadband - but didn't realise that in the process this deleted every email I had on that account! They said there is "no way" these emails can be recovered - not even by them. Surely there must be some way though, or some software?

Honestly you are completely stuffed.

If they say that they can't recover them then that's it.

It's one of the disadvantages of using webmail.

I agree with Curlyben. If you want to make sure that your emails are saved in the future, than I would copy and paste them into another program on your computer where you make documents.

We have no guarantee that anything we put on the web is going to be saved. If we save something on our own computers, we at least have a fighting chance that those things will be saved.

It may not be that that CAN'T recover them. Its just that they WON'T. They probably have backup tapes for the servers that might be used to temporarily restore your mailboxes. But this is a time consuming and costly process. They have no incentive to do this for a former customer.

Remember, using WEB based e-mail, all your e-mails are stored on THEIR servers. So any attempts to recover anything has to be done to their servers and there is no way they are going to let you do that.

Next time you cancel an e-mail account, ask how to save your e-mail first.