cPanel: Mailbox Suddenly Gone (SOLVED)

This guide will help you how to solve Mailbox that suddenly gone within cPanel server. There are some things need to follow as there are some sensitive file out there. Only applied for cPanel server.

Check the list email accounts

cPanel ready the email accounts from passwd file that located at :

/home/$user/etc/$domain/shadow

Now see current shadow user, how much email accounts there. If customer said have 20 emails and shadow file only showing 1 list, then shadow file is corrupt.

In this case, restore this shadow file as per yesterday and put into /root/$user/ to make everything easy.

After r1soft restore process complete, now move /root$user/shadow to designated path. Backup previous show file first.

mv /home/$user/etc/$domain/shadow /home/$user/etc/$domain/shadow-old
cp /root/$user/shadow /home/$user/etc/$domain/

Remove Cache

Since cPanel has a static cache system for their mail configuration and such, so we need to remove that static cache. It is located to:

/home/$user/.cpanel

Now try rename .cpanel to something else.

mv /home/$user/.cpanel /home/$user/.cpanel-old

Now we need to restart cPanel daemon process in order to re-cache.

service cpanel restart

Wait for a minute, and the server recached and your previous mail accounts will be visible again.