The Email Archiving feature allows users to save incoming, outgoing, or mailing list messages for a specified amount of time. cPanel stores the messages in the mail directory in the user’s home directory. Each day, the system generates a new directory with the archivetype.YYYY-MM-DD format to contain all of the messages for the specified archive type.

• When the server receives a message, it will immediately archive it.
  • This action takes place before the system applies any filters.
  • The system will archive both spam and non-spam emails.
• Email that you received before you enabled the Email Archiving feature is not archived.
  • Run the /usr/local/cpanel/scripts/email_archive_maintenance script to archive these messages.

You can view the messages from the cPanel interface or in a mail client. When you enable Email Archiving, the amount of disk space that the feature uses can quickly grow based on the length of time over which you store messages. Verify that your disk drive has ample space before you enable Email Archiving.

Default Mail Archiving Configuration#

To enable a default configuration to use for all of your domains, perform the following steps:

1. Select the desired archive type.
2. Select the length of time during which mail should remain in the archive.
3. Click Apply to All of My Domains to apply the default configuration to all of the domains that you currently own.

Manage Archiving#

The Manage Archiving table lists the archiving settings for each of your domains.

Modify email archiving for a domain#

To make changes to an existing email archiving configuration, perform the following steps:

1. In the table, find the domain for which you wish to enable email archiving.
2. Select the desired archive type.
3. Select the length of time during which mail should remain in the archive.
4. You will receive a notification that the Email Archiving feature is enabled.

IMAP Access#

You can view messages in multiple ways through an IMAP connection:

To use a cPanel-provided auto-configuration script, perform the following steps:

1. Click on the IMAP Access option next to the domain for which you wish to view messages.
2. Choose from the list of mail clients and select either IMAP over SSL/TLS (recommended) or IMAP.
3. Follow the instructions to complete the setup.
4. Use the provided settings to manually set up a read-only configuration via IMAP.

To manually configure your mail client, perform the following steps:

1. Click on the IMAP Access option next to the domain whose messages you want to view.
2. In the selected mail client, provide the following information, where example.com is your domain name:
   • Mail Server Username: [email protected]
     • Your password is the same as your account password.
   • Incoming Mail Server: (SSL) mail.example.com
     • IMAP port: 993
   • Incoming Mail Server: (non-SSL) mail.example.com
     • IMAP port: 143
3. After you provide the information to your mail client, the daily directories will appear in the folder list.

Download Archives#

To download the archives to your PC, perform the following steps:

1. Click the Download Archives option next to the domain for which you wish to view messages.
2. Select from the following options:
   • All archives
   • Incoming
   • Mailing Lists
   • Outgoing
3. A .zip file that contains the archived messages will download to your local computer.

Access Webmail#

Use the Access Webmail link to view archived messages through Webmail. You may need to take additional steps on some webmail clients.