Exporting email accounts

E-mail account usernames and passwords are stored in files named passwd and shadow in the following directory structure:

/$HOME/$USER/etc/$DOMAIN/

where:

• $HOME is the actual account home directory;
• $USER is the cPanel account user, and;
• $DOMAIN is the actual domain in question.

Passwords are stored in shadow in this directory in salted MD5 format. There is no way to make them human-readable, but the file can be copied and the passwords will still work.

The actual mailboxes are stored in the following format:

/$HOME/$USER/mail/$DOMAIN/$MAILBOX

where $MAILBOX is the name of the mailbox user as defined in cPanel. $MAILBOX is a directory containing all of the files related to the actual mail account data.

You can copy the files and directories from the etc and mail directories from one cPanel account to another, or from one server to another. Make sure to apply the ownerships of the destination account to the files and directories. Also, make sure to move the following files out of the way before logging into cPanel on the destination account:

/$HOME/$USER/.cpanel/email_accounts.cache
/$HOME/$USER/.cpanel/email_accounts.yaml

These files will automatically be created when you log into cPanel.

 

The files should be owned by username:mail for /$HOME/$USER/mail/$DOMAIN/$MAILBOX path, so something like:

Code:

cd /$HOME/$USER/mail/$DOMAIN/
chown -R username:mail $MAILBOX

Where /$HOME is where you have your /home directory (normally, this is just /home itself), $USER is the cPanel username, $DOMAIN is the domain name, and $MAILBOX is the email account username.