However, if you do not check the account that is being forwarded, all of those emails will pile up until you reach your quota and the account “shuts down.”

You have several options:

1) Set up a cron job to regularly delete those emails (covered in my previous post “Cron Job to Clear Out an Overstuffed Email Inbox“ )  This is a more advanced solution.

2) Delete the  email address for the original account (requires logging into cPanel).  Then set up the forwarder.  Forwarders and email accounts are separate in cPanel. When you set up a forwarder that does not have the original email account created, cPanel will forward the mail without saving it on the server.  Caveat: I have not personally tried this approach, but have read about it in multiple places.

3) Set up an email filter.  This offers a secondary advantage in that it can be done at the account level (does not require cPanel log in permission).  You can use cPanel, but not required. Let’s say you do it at the email account level. Log into your email (the original account),  via Horde or your preferred UI.   In Horde, look for the icon along the top that says “Filters.”  In the “Rules,” section” select the option “Any header. ” Enter your original email address. In the “Actions” area, select “Redirect to email.” Enter the email address you want to forward the email to.  You have just set up cPanel to mimic forward and delete behavior.

I’ll have more about filtering in an upcoming post. This barely touches on what it can do for you.

I don’t use Outlook or download my email anymore because I prefer to leave it on the server where I can access it from any computer or mobile device. Let’s face it, cPanel’s email web interfaces (Horde, SquirrelMail and RoundCube) were nice years ago, but they are lousy on an iPhone and lack the features and power of Gmail.

You manage a number of sites and quickly get overrun with lots of email addresses.  Instead of trying to remember to checkmany email addresses, send all email to a single address that you check.

You want to keep your emails to conduct searches later but do not have enough disk space. Gmail offers a tremendous amount of free storage space where you can archive your emails.

Here is how to set up email forwarding. I assume the email address is already set up.

1. Log into cPanel. Look for the icon and link named  ”Forwarders.”  (Shown at the top of this post.)
2. Click the button “Add Forwarder.”
3. Fill in the address to forward. Then fill in the field where you want the email forwarded to.
4. Click the “Add Forwarder” button and you are done.

This is optional but also helpful:  in Gmail, you can set up powerful filters (“Settings” | “Filters”) to manage these emails do they do not all get dumped into one big inbox.

Forwarding email to another email address is a useful and powerful tool that helps simplify my life.

Take a look at The Top 500 Worst Passwords of All Time:

From the moment people started using passwords, it didn’t take long to realize how many people picked the very same passwords over and over. Even the way people misspell words is consistent. In fact, people are so predictable that most hackers make use of lists of common passwords just like these. To give you some insight into how predictable humans are, the following is a list of the 500 most common passwords. If you see your password on this list, please change it immediately. Keep in mind that every password listed here has been used by at least hundreds if not thousands of other people.

There are some interesting passwords on this list that show how people try to be clever, but even human cleverness is predictable.

Here is a handy random password generator that I use often.

Awhile ago I moved into a house that had a password protected security system. The previous owners did not provide the password. I was able to guess the password and was able to walk right into an unlocked house. That password was among the top 10. Though friends and family were amazed at my abilities, I had simply used what I knew was a common password. (I never told them my little trick that made getting in easy.)  Don’t let your email, website, or any online login be as wide open as that house was.

Click the AutoLoad link under your preferred webmail client and when you log in in the future, that webmail client will automatically load instead of giving you the option to select webmail client.

Remember to use the secure login when you are using a wireless internet connection that is not your own secured network.

cPanel

• Non-Secure http://yoursite.com/cpanel/
• Non-Secure http://yoursite.com:2082/
• Secure https://yoursite.com:2083/

Webmail

• Non-Secure http://yoursite.com/webmail/
• Non-Secure http://yoursite.com:2095/
• Secure https://yoursite.com:2096/

On the email filter page, cPanel says: “Hint: To filter all mail that SpamAssasin has marked as spam, just choose “SpamAssassin Spam Header”, “begins with”, and then enter “Yes” in the box.”

In fixing theare some of the wrong entries I found for “Yes” that had been typed into the box:

What was entered: “Yes” Should have been: Yes (do not type the quotes into the box!)

What was entered: yes Should have been: Yes (only first letter is capitalized, Unix is case-sensitive)

What was entered: YES Should have been: Yes (only first letter is capitalized, Unix is case-sensitive)

These are easy mistakes to make because we’re always in a hurry. I was a hero several times for quickly “fixing” SpamAssassin quickly. Upon being told that SpamAssassin was “broken,” I could have spent hours diving into all sorts of things on the server. Fortunately, I had checked the filters first. Hope this saves someone time and avoids a big headache.

Log into cPanel, click the “File Manager” icon. Go to the directory named (appropriately) “mail.” (Your “public_html” directory is at the same level directory as “mail.”) When you have only one, default, email set up, you will find what appears to be files for “inbox,” “saved-messages,” “sent-mail” and possibly others depending on how much you have used this email account.

After you have set up several email addresses, you will find additional directories in your “mail” directory that match the email addresses. Open one of these and you will find additional files that contain the email for this email address.

You can also look for email by logging in via FTP using your favorite FTP software. Most accounts are set up so that upon log in, you are at your “home” directory. Click around just like above and you will see where email is located.

Sometimes after deleting an email address, cPanel does not delete all the files for that email address. Now that you know where email is stored, you can delete files and directories yourself to clean up and free up disk space.

It is time for drastic action. I say “drastic” because this cron job will delete all the emails in one fell swoop. And it will delete all emails that are in the email inbox everytime it runs. There is no recovery path for getting any of those emails back. Nonetheless, in some cases deleting all emails is justified. I use this with some accounts. I might be deleting real emails, but there is so much crap, that I feel it is worth it. Just so you know the downside of this cron job.

Here is the syntax for deleting all email in the inbox of the default email address for a website:

echo -n > /home/youraccount/mail/inbox

Replace youraccount with your site login name (for example, the name you use to FTP to your site).

To determine the path to another email address, log into your site via FTP. Go to the mail directory (it is at the same level as public_html). Here you will see other email addresses as directory names. Click around, there might be subdirectories that you want to work with. To delete mail from a different email address, replace inbox above with the path you found while exploring via FTP.

Good luck. Happy email deleting. I think it feels good to blow away all that email. And I do it regularly for some accounts using this handy cron job.

The first step is to check the email address. User error causes lots of issues. The server just does what it is told. No, the server cannot correct misspelled names. For example, someone was upset that their email they wanted to send to kyle@ but they typed kylr@ was not automatically corrected by the server.

What to do: Log into the default email account for your server (login@yourdomain.com) and you might find more emails than you care to know about. Misdirected emails will be in this email. There might even be many emails that could not be sent. Open some of these emails to see the error messages. You might learn something useful.