How to bulk delete email accounts from cPanel / my hosting account?

Question

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:

[email protected]
[email protected]
[email protected]
[email protected]
etc...

How can I do this in bulk?

Answer 1

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:

   account_003
   account_004
   account_012
   account_027
   etc...
   

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!

Answer 2

To improve the answer provided by Brock Adams.

At this time the /usr/local/cpanel/cpanel-email command doesn't work as it should, at least not for me.

So I had to use the UAPI function for this purpose and it works like a charm.

You can check the full documentation from here: https://documentation.cpanel.net/display/DD/UAPI+Functions+-+Email%3A%3Adelete_pop

The final command should be something like:

for i in `cat email-accts.txt`; do /usr/local/cpanel/bin/uapi --user=CPANEL-USER Email delete_pop email="$i" domain=DOMAIN ; done

Hope this helps. :)