Default account disk usage and thousands of hidden directories

[listss]

Hello, this is to do with a default account appearing to occupy more space than it does.

The default email account contains all of about 18 emails ranging from 1kB to 10kB size, and should actually occupy no more than about ~60kB.

So where does the 917MB come from?
I manually added up the used amounts across all mail accounts listed in cPanel and can find about 9GB

du command on the server shows even higher
du --max-depth=1 -h /home/user/mail
11G

Why are there thousands of hidden files?
ls -a | wc -l
13272

example hidden directories
24K /home/user/mail/.info.cur.1569460099_M{number}P{number}_{cpanel_server_address},S={number},W={number}:2,S
24K /home/user/mail/.info.cur.1526601888_M{number}P{number}_{cpanel_server_address},S={number},W={number}:2,S

All seem to contain empty directories and dovecot files.
ls /home/user/mail/.info.cur.1569460099_M{number}P{number}_{cpanel_server_address},S={number},W={number}:2,S
. .. cur dovecot.index.log dovecot-uidlist new tmp

... again, there are thousands of this hidden directories, all for no more than about 30 email accounts total.....
The two largest accounts only occupy about 4G and 2G respectively.

Is it safe to delete all these seemingly useless .acc.cur.* directories?

Quota used on the account

Location	Size (MB)	Disk Usage
Files in home directory.	1.91 MB
Files in hidden subdirectories.	41.70 MB
bin/	0.00 MB
cache/	0.07 MB
cpmove.psql/	0.00 MB
sub-account	0.00 MB
etc/	12.45 MB
fantastico_backups/	0.01 MB
logs/	4.69 MB
perl/	0.00 MB
perl5/	0.00 MB
php/	0.08 MB
public_ftp/	0.00 MB
public_html/	528.61 MB
ssl/	0.47 MB
tmp/	455.66 MB
var/	0.01 MB
MySQL	313.62 MB
Mailing Lists	0.00 MB
Email Archives	1.66 MB	* Contained in the mail directory.
Email Accounts	10,976.36 MB	* Contained in the mail directory.
	12,335.64 MB total disk space used.
	15,880.00 MB quota limit (11,894.44 MB used).

Default account quota in cPanel

Default

Unrestricted

917.17 MB / ∞

 

[SamuelM]

Hello @listss

Thank you for contacting cPanel!

What you've described closely resembles what was reported in our internal case CPANEL-31909. It was reported that this issue occurs when 1) an email account is created for an aliased domain, 2) that aliased domain has been removed but messages for that email account remain in the cPanel account, and 3) the account is transferred. The oddly named hidden directories end up being created in the transferred account

This issue was actually patched in cPanel 88:

https://docs.cpanel.net/changelogs/88-change-log/

Fixed case CPANEL-31909: Fix issue with mail files from deleted domains being all placed directly under the mail subdirectory.

However, if you have already updated, or plan to update soon, these directories will still remain in place. It is indeed safe to remove those directories, and that is the recommended solution. Please let us know if you have any questions.