How to auto delete old emails for cPanel User

email-delete
email-delete

If your mailbox that is always going over-quota or filling up with mail like your default account or your spam box and you don’t want to have to keep logging in and deleting the emails manually below you can find the steps how to auto delete the emails.

  1. Log on to your cPanel Interface.
  2. Go to ”Advanced‘ section.
  3. Click on “Cron Jobs“.
  4. Select the specific time from the lists provided.
  5. You should enter the command to run in the “Command” field.
Note: You should make sure to enter the proper command and the full path to the file.

Check the relevant screen captures:

To do this enter the following information in the following fields:

Minute: 45
Hour: 06
Day: *
Month: *
Weekday: *

Command: /usr/bin/archivemail –quiet –delete –days 10 /home/{USER}/mail/inbox

Make sure you replace {USER} with your actual cPanel username.

Hit the Commit Changes button and wait until sometime after 6:45 AM (assuming you set it up to run at that time) and login to your default email account to see if your emails have been deleted

If everything looks good your default inbox will now have any emails that are older than 10 days automatically deleted

To login into your default email account you use your cpanel username and password

If you wanted to have all the emails deleted that are older than three days you would simply change the –days option to 3

If you wanted to have all emails inside your mail directory including sent mail, spam, etc. that are older than 30 days deleted…
/usr/bin/archivemail –quiet –delete –days 30 /home/{USER}/mail/*

If you had an email account named info @ yourdomain.com and wanted to have all the emails in that inbox that are older than seven days deleted…
/usr/bin/archivemail –quiet –delete –days 7 /home/{USER}/mail/{yourdomain.com}/info/inbox

If you had an email account named info @ yourdomain.com and wanted to have all the emails in your sent-mail folder that are older than twenty-one days deleted…
/usr/bin/archivemail –quiet –delete –days 21 /home/{USER}/mail/{yourdomain.com}/info/sent-mail

Don’t forget to change {yourdomain.com} to your actual domain name !

You can look in your mail directory via your ftp client or the online file manager to see where your mailboxes are located.

NOTE: We *CANNOT* recover mail deleted in this manner, so please use this tutorial at your own risk