Find cPanel ID associated with brand e-mail addresses

[Roger Motte]

Hello everyone,

My friend has many e-mail addresses with her domain name, that she accesses through webmail.[domain].com.

The addresses were created by her Web Development Agency years ago. Since then, the Agency failed to deliver the Website she paid them for, and they are on bad terms.

Here are my questions:

1) Are all "domain" e-mail addresses associated with a cPanel ID?

2) If yes, how can we find the e-mail address of a cPanel ID that is associated with her domain e-mail addresses? We tried to reset the cPanel Password with many possibilities of e-mail addresses that belong to her, and no Password were sent to us. At this point, we are worried that her domain e-mail addresses are linked to a cPanel ID that belongs to the Agency. And that they could shut down her mailboxes, or worse, access them and misuse some information. Of course, she owns the domain.

Thank you in advance

 

[cPRex]

Hey there! I think we need to clarify some terms to avoid confusion.

We use "cPanel ID" to mean our logins to Forums, Support, and other cPanel resources on our side. However, those are completely separate from any hosting or domain names a user may have.

When you create an email account on a cPanel machine, yes, that account is under a domain and username on the system. But no, there is no correlation between that and a cPanel ID.

 

[Roger Motte]

Thank you cPRex,

It clarifies some things.

Basically the situation was this:
- There was a "mail" A record for her domain that pointed to an address that belongs to iWeb technologies, a cPanel partner
- Then a "webmail" A record for the domain that pointed to the same address
- Then a MX record with value: mail.[domain].com

We have no idea how the development agency (who are not iWeb) set these records up and how they created our domain e-mails.

All we know is we can access those domain e-mail mailboxes through webmail.[domain].com, which has a cpanel-like interface.

Today we moved the domain to another registrar that allows us to set our own DNS settings. We changed the name servers to that new registrar's and recreated the three "A" and "MX" records above. Thankfully, the e-mails still work, everything looks good.

Some questions remain:
- How long will these mailboxes remain accessible to us? Do they actually belong to someone else?
- How come they are free? We don't even have contact info in them.
- Who should we contact in case we ever need support?

We had a chat with iWeb to get answers. We told them the e-mail addresses and they asked us for our client ID (we don't know it) and then just said we should contact our "lease server". Then chat ended.

You're pretty much Obi-Wan Kenobi here cPRex. Our last hope (for understanding).

 

[cPRex]

Did you secretly find out about my Star Wars obsession before saying that?

Send me a private message with your domain name and I'll do some digging for you.

 

[cPRex]

Thanks for the message, @Roger Motte - let's answer these questions in order so we don't miss anything:

Question 1 - How long will these mailboxes remain accessible to us? Do they actually belong to someone else?
Answer - These will be up and accessible as long as the hosting is paid for at the location they are being accessed. Just because the DNS has been pointed to a different location doesn't mean the files are moved in any way.

Question 2 - How come they are free? We don't even have contact info in them.
Answer - That's the fun question. They likely aren't free, but could have been paid for a year (or more) in advance, as cheaper hosting plans, especially Shared accounts, often have discounts for paying for a full year in advance.

Question 3 - Who should we contact in case we ever need support?
Answer - This is the one I really needed the private message for, so we don't post a public domain on the forums. The trick here is that your domain is being pointed to a different IP address than the webmail.domain.com subdomain.

If we look up the IP of the webmail subdomain that you provided, I can tell you that you're hosted through Funio: Hosting Made Easy - VPS and Hosting plans for Wordpress, ecommerce, websites and much more. If you contact them, you may be able to get more access to the account depending on what information you can provide.

I'll send some additional thoughts through the private message as well.