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I'd like to delete a few hundred email accounts from my domain (it's not all of them).

I've looked and looked. cPanel and Hostgator allow you to bulk-create email accounts and forwarders and there may be a way to bulk-delete forwarders but there doesn't seem to be a way to delete email accounts -- except one click at a time.

So, if I have 197 email accounts to delete:


How can I do this in bulk?

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1 Answer 1

up vote 3 down vote accepted

Finally stumbled on the delpop command and cPanel's command-line interface.

So, assuming:

  1. You have SSH access to your account
  2. Your host has installed cPanel in the usual way

Then you can delete a single email account with this command, using an SSH client like PuTTY:

/usr/local/cpanel/cpanel-email delpop account_003 0 mydomain.com

To delete many accounts, all on domain mydomain.com, do this:

  1. Create a text file, delemails.txt, with each account name on its own line:

  2. FTP that file onto your server into a convenient location.

  3. SSH onto your server and cd to the location where you placed delemails.txt

  4. Run this command from the SSH shell:

    for i in `cat delemails.txt`; do /usr/local/cpanel/cpanel-email delpop "$i" 0 mydomain.com ; done

    It takes a couple of minutes to loop through 197 accounts and you'll see status messages printing for each account.

  5. Done!

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