Misdirected spam mail often gets sent to the default account. More often than not, no one checks that account, and soon it fills up quickly. Once it exceeds your quota, you may be unable to send and receive mail.

If you're confident that there's nothing important in the account, here's how to clear it all at once... and prevent future buildup.

First you'll want to be sure all new misdirected mail gets sent to the right place.

1. Log into Cpanel and click on the Mail icon.
2. Click on Default Address - currently your accounts probably point to the cpanel username, which causes them to build up unless you clear it often.
3. Click "Set Default Address" and either enter:
   1. A real admin address to forward misdirected mail
   2. Set it as :fail: to bounce the email back to the sender.
   3. You can also use :blackhole: to automatically delete the mail, however, we do not recommend this option as this can put a strain on the server if you are getting a lot of unwanted mail.

How to clear any old mail that was stored
Mail in your default account is stored in the "Mail" folder of your hosting account. Using your favorite FTP program, you can navigate into this directory. You will see two subdirectories named "cur" and "new". Deleting all of the files within those folders will effectively remove all of the mail from your default account. Make sure you just delete the files within those folders, rather than deleting the folders themselves, as you won't be able to recreate them properly.

If you have a lot of mail in your default account, it will take some time to delete it all using FTP, so it may be best to submit a ticket at our helpdesk and have one of our admins delete it for you.

Add to Favourites
Print this Article