I've not had any movement on this, and seem to have established myself as JohnVenessUK now. So can someone please delete the zombie JohnVeness account that I never managed to activate?

Exactly same problem here. It was solved as you described, but I'm a little disappointed. I lost all my history, my whatchlist and so on. Cloying.

I don't know if this can solve it, but...
If you can access the account, you can change the account email.
https://www.themoviedb.org/settings/profile
I don't know if you will need to authorize it by accessing the lost email account.

Thanks for the reply, but that didn't work unfortunately.

I still have the old password for the JohnVeness account, but if I try to login as that, I immediately get presented with a page saying I need to verify my email address - in other words, I cannot bypass that and access the https://www.themoviedb.org/settings/profile page (if I try going to that URL after logging in, I get "You don't have permission to access this page").

I tried typing in the old email address again at the verification stage, just in case, but it still says "There was a problem. We received a bounce notification when we attempted to send an email on 5 July 2021 at 4:50 PM".

I wondered what would happen if I typed in a different (but known working) email address at the verification stage. Interestingly, instead of the bounce error message, it brings up the message "Verification Email Sent. We have sent another verification email to this address if it belongs to a registered account on TMDB."

Unfortunately, this didn't result in any email being received, I guess because it wasn't the email address I originally used to register the JohnVeness account.

It seems you only get one chance to type in a correct email address when setting up an account, or that username will forever be stuck in limbo (unless an admin intervenes).

As I say, for myself, I'm happy with my established JohnVenessUK username now, but you might wish to delete the JohnVeness account that's just taking up space.

@JohnVenessUK said:

Thanks for the reply, but that didn't work unfortunately.

I still have the old password for the JohnVeness account, but if I try to login as that, I immediately get presented with a page saying I need to verify my email address - in other words, I cannot bypass that and access the https://www.themoviedb.org/settings/profile page (if I try going to that URL after logging in, I get "You don't have permission to access this page").

I tried typing in the old email address again at the verification stage, just in case, but it still says "There was a problem. We received a bounce notification when we attempted to send an email on 5 July 2021 at 4:50 PM".

I wondered what would happen if I typed in a different (but known working) email address at the verification stage. Interestingly, instead of the bounce error message, it brings up the message "Verification Email Sent. We have sent another verification email to this address if it belongs to a registered account on TMDB."

Unfortunately, this didn't result in any email being received, I guess because it wasn't the email address I originally used to register the JohnVeness account.

It seems you only get one chance to type in a correct email address when setting up an account, or that username will forever be stuck in limbo (unless an admin intervenes).

As I say, for myself, I'm happy with my established JohnVenessUK username now, but you might wish to delete the JohnVeness account that's just taking up space.

Yes, I believe this first account is going into limbo.
And only administrator Travis Bell can delete the account.
Maybe he'll stop by and give us some news.

Thanks :)