How to Bulk Update/Change Contact Email for accounts in WHM

In this tutorial, you will learn how to bulk update/change Contact Email for accounts in WHM. This is useful when you have a reseller and want to change the default email address on all of the accounts with a different email address.

If you’re not feeling comfortable using the command line interface, we recommend you to do it manually in WHM.

To do so,  navigate to Account Information >> List Accounts area. Here you will see all the accounts listed. Then click on the ‘+’ sign in front of the username then change the contact email for the account(s) that you want.

In case you prefer doing it for a single or few accounts from the command line, you can use:

cpapi2 --user=user CustInfo savecontactinfo [email protected]

How to Bulk Update/Change Contact Email for accounts in WHM

The contact email address for each cPanel account is stored in two different files:

• /var/cpanel/users/user
• /home/user/.contactemail

Let’s say that you need to change an existing contact email: [email protected] and to replace it for all the cPanel accounts with [email protected].

Tired of hassling with hosting management?  ChemiCloud is the managed hosting solution designed to save you time and money! 🤓 Check out our web hosting plans!

While you are in your terminal, connected to your server, browse to /var/cpanel/users/:

cd /var/cpanel/users/

And do a grep for “[email protected]” in each file:

grep -irl "[email protected]" .

It will start listing the files that have a match for the search term. E.g:

./user1
./user2
./user3

Now you will have to create a text file in /var/cpanel/users/ e.g: users.txt and to add the results of your search using grep command.

Next, we’ll use sed to replace all the instances matching [email protected] with [email protected]. The command line is:

for i in $(cat users.txt); do sed -i 's/[email protected]/[email protected]/g' $i; done

The same steps will need to be applied to do the bulk change of the email stored in /home/user/.contactemail.