cPanel Mail Main Account and Workaround to Disable

For webmasters or server administrators who are using cPanel or other control panel as the web hosting control panel, may usually see a default email account named “Main Account” existed in cPanel Mail Account Maintenance whenever they want to add, remove or manage email accounts under Mail Manager. The Main Account can’t be deleted or have quota set or modified, and you can’t send email out through this account too.

The Main Account has the default email address which same with the web hosting account username, such as login_name@domain.com. The Main Account existed to collect any email that is sent to an unknown account at the domain name, where all mail for wrong email address or user accounts that do not exist is routed to. As it’s for catchall purpose, so it’s not a valid email address, and cannot be used for emailing purpose other than collection of invalid emails sent to your domain.

You can access the domain email Main Account via webmail interface by using the following URL:

http://domain_name.com:2095/

You can also use POP3 or IMAP access protocol to download or read the email sent to this Main Account with any email clients such as Outlook. The user name and password for this Main Account is normally same with the hosting account user ID and its password.

As there is no way to delete this “Main Account”, so it’s only possible to use a workaround to make the Main Account useless and as if disable. As mentioned, the Main Account served as a catch-all account for unroutable emails to the domain, so the alternative solution to delete or disable this Main Account is by redirecting all invalid emails to another email address or discard them instead. To do so, follow this steps:

1. Login to your cPanel.
2. Go to Mail, then select Default Address.
3. Click on the Set Default Address link.
4. Enter a new valid email address to redirect all unrouted mail to in the text field next to web site domain name drop-down list. Select the correct root domain name if you have sub-domains.

   Alternatively, you can also set the default address as :blackhole: to throw away all incoming unrouted mail, or :fail: bounce message (replace bounce message with your own text, such as no such user here, or left blank) to bounce the unroutable email back to the sender.

5. Click on the Change button, and your Main Account will no longer receive any email.

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This entry was posted on Monday, July 16th, 2007 at 12:56 am and is filed under Webmaster Resources. You can follow any responses to this entry through the RSS 2.0 feed. You can leave a response, or trackback from your own site.