Need to move hosts - looking for bulk mail account creation

wingnut

We've been with Hosting365 for some time. Unfortunately they do not allow bulk creation of email accounts. When I asked about creating accounts (700) support suggested I create them one by one on H-Sphere.

Because I do not have a day or two to waste I am now looking to move to a hosting provider that will allow bulk creation of EMail accounts from a CSV or similar list. Anyone using such a service at the moment? I would consider it a fairly basic feature and am surprised it is not available with some hosting packages.

CuLT

Sounds to me like maybe the support guy doesn't know much about H-Sphere or Google.

Guide on how to bulk create accounts through H-Sphere.

I don't imagine that's going to be a cakewalk either, at some point you're going to have to type out all that data or import it from another location. If you already have a list written up it might be worthwhile enlisting the aid of a freelance scriptwriter to format the information appropriately.

Remember, email accounts usually require usernames, passwords and quotas amongst other optional data (real name, mail filtering options, etc) and that information must be supplied in some way. Of course email forwards are a completely different ball game and more or less just require a script that takes the required address as the first argument and the target as the second.

zod

google apps allows a CSV to be imported .. there may be limit of 200 email accounts though unless your education related or willing to pay

http://www.google.com/a/help/intl/en/admins/editions_spe.html

mneylon

Most of the more popular control panels have some form of API, so it's probably possible with all of them. How easy it is, however, is another matter

Most people don't need to create emails accounts en masse, so it's not surprising that most control panels don't come with the option builtin to the normal UI

wingnut

Thats CuLT but we a looking for a fast reliable long term and easy solution. We will be deleting creating 180 users a year.

Thanks for the info. Regarding Google Apps we are considering this option. We have an education account so can have 1000+ user accounts. One annoyance I have noticed on google apps is that you can't edit mailing lists. You can only addresses on creation, and delete the list. A small thing but annoying none the less. We will continue to dig.

steve-hosting36

Hi Wingnut,

We can create email accounts from a spreasheet list if you wish, altho if you are going to be doing huge numbers on a regular basis, it makes more sense to have a dedicated email server solution, which you can import / export and manage from on a large scale basis much more simply.

Feel free to pm / mail me directly to sort the initial import and to discuss other options that might be available.

Stephen