posted
hi there this is a web hosting question from a non techie idiot (me) please excuse the crap I'm about to write in order to attempt to explain what's happening....
I've got one domain which I now can't receive email through. When I try and send an email to it I get a bounceback with "mailbox is full: retry timeout exceeded"
going into Cpanel and Disk Space Usage it seems that theres's a ton of email stuck in one directory. - mail/new. In fact 105mb.
I think I've worked out that most of this is spam sent to random names like bob@mydomain.com or sales@mydomain.com etc, basically accounts that I haven't set up.
It seems that all this mail ends up in a default address. I wasn't aware of this, but I have now changed the default address so any mail without a proper email name gets the following ":fail: no such address here".
Still, I seem to have thousands of spam stuck in my mail/new directory. I can see the individual files when I go to file manager >mail>new and theres the list of mails. I can delete them individually, but obviously that's going to take , like, years.
Anyone know of a way of deleting all these shitty mails out of cpanel?
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:fail: sends a bounce back to who ever sent the message so if the spambot is set up that way, the bounce back tells it that it's guessed a real domain and to hammer it with every/any word it can think of in hopes of finally getting through. :blackhole: just sends the unsolicited email straight to the bin so that it doesn't bother you or notify the spambot that someone could be listening.
As to getting rid of the email. If you have access to SSH, connect to the domain via telnet then,
ls <--- to view your files
cd mail <--- to login to folder where you e-mail accounts are stored
ls <-- To view list of your e-mail accounts
cd yourdomain.com <-- replace yourdomain.com with your actual domain name
rm -rf emailaccount <-- replace emailaccount with the email account that you want all its emails to be removed.
For example rm -rf peter
If you don't have SSH (most hosts don't allow it cuz they don't trust you), the next quickest way is to go into cPanel and remove the email account and then recreate it.
Or, finally, failing the above, sign into cPanel > check webmail for the effected account > HORDE > and once in look for the option (under folder manager) to empty folder
[ 05.03.2008, 07:26: Message edited by: sabian ]
-------------------- Evil isn't what you've done, it's feeling bad about it afterwards... Yield to temptation. It may not pass your way again. Posts: 3793
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I don't have er, understand telnet, I've gone the Hoard route.
I can't find folder manager - at least not for that default address account. I'e found 7000+ spam emails in there, all marked as unread, which I can delete through hoarde - although only 20 at a time arghhhhh...
I don't think I can delete the account, because it's the default account, if it was for an account that I set up, I could easily delete it.
This is the screen I have got through to
I can delete the emails albeit slowly, and hopefully now I set up the default address to fail, it shouldn't fill up.
posted
Sorry, I said folder manager, I meant folder navigator.
-------------------- Evil isn't what you've done, it's feeling bad about it afterwards... Yield to temptation. It may not pass your way again. Posts: 3793
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