[Rob]

One of the easiest solutions, at no real cost to you would be to get an email account such as gmail, hotmail or whatever, that is not dependent on any ISP.

An alternative is to register a domain, but that is then going to incur you in the expense of some form of hosting service, even a basic one, so that you can send and receive email. The Virgin Media webspace / hosting facility doesn't support that properly. You can redirect your domain webspace to your Virgin Media website I believe - not tried it myself. The email would have to forward, incoming to your VM account, by which time you might just as well have connected to your own hosting service. A workaround might be to use a third party domain control system such as zonedit, to control forwarding of a single email account from your domain.