As many people know, I host my websites with a company called JaguarPC. JPC offers a “clients helping clients” forum, and given my background in both web development and system administration, I find myself answering a lot of peoples’ questions.

One nice feature of JPC is that they allow multihosting—or hosting of multiple websites on a single account. JPC uses the CPanel control panel system and CPanel introduced a way to create email accounts on multihosted domains a long time ago. JPC, unfortunately, hasn’t updated their CPanel skins to accomodate this enhancement, and it is one of the biggest complaints that people have. After a little digging I found a way to use Firefox’s Web Developer toolbar to get around the skin issue, which I posted to JPC’s message board.

A couple weeks later, Chris Batchelor (a.k.a. Galen at JPC) contacted me asking if I knew how to delete an account. There seems to be a bug in CPanel (or JPC’s implementation of it) that prevents deleting email accounts on multihosted domains. Again I got to work, and when I couldn’t figure it out using CPanel, I went to the filesystem and figured out where CPanel stores all of its email account info and I sent this to Galen.

This weekend I got another message from Galen. He liked my solution so much that he’s written a tutorial and asked for my permission to put my name on it (thanks, Galen!).

So, if you want to create email accounts for multihosted domains, check out Adding POP Accounts for Multi-Hosted Domains. Remember, of course that this is only an expreimental technique. If you use it and screw up your account it isn’t my fault, or Galen’s. And don’t expect your host to bail you out, either—after all, they aren’t supporting the feature you’re using. Some hosts might be nice and help you restore your site, but don’t expect it from them.