Verizon email blocked from England and Italy.

Question

Earlier this month, while in England for two days and Italy for a week, I was unable to log into my verizon.net email account.  I spent an hour on the chat function from Rome one evening with a Verizon tech trying to straighten out the mysterious problem.  It would not work with Thunderbird, my usual email program, or work by logging directly in the Verizon site.  The tech had me change my password several times, and although he himself was able to log into the Verizon site using my username from his end, I was unable to do this from Italy.
When I returned to the US, I got on the phone with a Verizon tech who had me change my password and--bingo--it worked, both in Thunderbird and in the Verizon site.  When I told him that I was unable to log in from England or Italy, he told me that Verizon email accounts were recently subject to hacks from sites outside the US, and for that reason Verizon had blocked access to email from abroad.  He said that they were working on a solution.
Astonishing. 
Verizon sent me no messages that this would happen, and I didn't see any notice on the Verizon site.  This meant that while I was in Italy I was unable to send email or retrieve messages from the very people whom I had traveled so far and spent so much money to see.  They were waiting there to hear from me, and for many of them I did not have a phone number with which to contact them.
What is more amazing is that the tech with whom I was communicating from Rome did not tell me this.  If he did not know that Verizon email in the US was blocked from access while abroad, he was wasting my time by changing all those passwords, and was incompetent to boot.  If he did know this, he was in effect lying to me and still wasting my time. 
Will someone from Verizon please explain this?
Edit:  After posting this, I noticed the locked post above from britany_VZ (dated 2014!) regarding overseas access to Verizon email.  Since I have never read this forum before, this was my only notification of this.  An account holder should not be required to read a discussion forum to learn something like this.  
I will point out that it still has little to do with my experience.  Nothing I did, and nothing that the Verizon tech did, would get me into my email account, and it remains that the tech with whom I discussed this a few days ago said that access to accounts was blocked--period.
Question:  when I return to Italy in May, will I be able to access my email account?

Answer 1

And further down the topics I just noticed the long thread on this very topic.  And I noticed how old it is, with no fix in sight.
Looks as if forwarding email is the only workaround--short of closing the account.