Test email accounts are typically a security vulnerability. Originally made with an initial purpose of testing, many times with a weak or insecure password and then forgotten about. Regularly checking your server for [email protected] email accounts is a great security precaution.
Find "test" email accounts on cPanel servers
-
Login to your server via SSH as the root user.
-
Copy and paste this nifty one line command into the terminal:
-
grep -i 'test' /home/*/etc/*/passwd | awk 'BEGIN { FS = "/" } ; { print "test@" $5 " email address exists!"}'
-
-
If any test email accounts exist, you should see output similar to this:
-
grep -i 'test' /home/*/etc/*/passwd | awk 'BEGIN { FS = "/" } ; { print "test@" $5 " email address exists!"}'
-
You can search for other possible email aliases, such as "[email protected]" instead of a test by replacing 'test' with 'testing' in the one-liner.