Help Centre
› Personal Email
› How to Cancel a Personal Email Account
Cancelling an epost.plus account is a Client Area action that takes a couple of minutes. This tutorial covers the cancellation flow, what happens to your data during the grace period, how to export your mail before closing, and the specific UK-relevant considerations around cancelling an email account tied to other services like banking or government logins.
Cancelling an email address has cascading consequences. Anyone who has your email as a contact, any service using it for login or recovery, any subscription billing it — all need handling.
Plan at least a week before actually cancelling:
- List every service that has this email as your login.
- List every contact who still uses this address.
- Decide the replacement address and have it active before cancelling.
- Run a two-to-four-week forwarding or dual-use period to catch stragglers.
Before cancellation, export anything you want to keep:
- Mail. Export entire mailbox as a zipped archive from webmail › Settings › Export. Formats: mbox (open standard), EML per-message.
- Contacts. Export as vCard or CSV via Contacts › Export.
- Calendar. (Premium and VIP tiers.) Export as iCalendar (.ics) via Calendar › Export.
- Filters and rules. Screenshot the settings, or export via API if automating a migration.
- Signature templates. Copy signature HTML/text to a local document.
Once cancellation completes and data is purged (see grace period below), recovery is no longer possible.
Before cancelling, update services that use this address. Typical UK list:
- Banking: first-factor notifications, MFA emails (change recovery email in the bank's online banking).
- Government: HMRC personal tax account, DVLA, NHS login, Government Gateway.
- Utilities: energy, water, broadband, council tax, TV licence.
- Subscriptions: Netflix, Amazon, PayPal, streaming services.
- Social: Facebook, Instagram, LinkedIn, X, TikTok — each has its own email-change flow.
- Two-factor recovery addresses on every account that lists this mailbox as a recovery option.
- Domain registrar and hosting accounts if any — losing access here can be expensive to recover.
Set up a forwarder from the epost.plus address to your new address before cancelling, to catch anything you missed.
- Sign in to your SmartXHosting Client Area.
- Open the service entry for your epost.plus account.
- Click Manage then Request cancellation.
- Select cancellation type:
- End of billing period. Service runs to the end of your paid-up term, then closes. Default and usually best.
- Immediate. Service closes now, regardless of remaining paid time. No refund for unused days.
- Optionally enter a reason — helps SmartXHosting improve the service, not required.
- Click Submit. You receive a confirmation email.
After cancellation takes effect:
- Day 0: Service closes. Mailbox inaccessible via webmail, IMAP or SMTP. Incoming mail bounces back to sender with "address no longer in use".
- Day 1-30: Mailbox data retained on server in standby. Reactivation possible if you change your mind — contact support.
- Day 31: Data permanently deleted from primary storage.
- Day 31-60: Data may persist on backup media only. Recovery only for exceptional reasons (e.g. legal subpoena).
- Day 61+: Data is fully purged across all storage.
The username [email protected] stays reserved for you for 90 days post-cancellation, preventing someone else registering it immediately. After 90 days, the username returns to the pool and can be registered by another user.
- Within 14 days of initial order. Full refund under UK consumer law (Consumer Contracts Regulations 2013).
- After 14 days, cancellation at end of paid term. No refund — service continues to the end of the paid period you already paid for.
- After 14 days, immediate cancellation. No refund for unused days.
- Exceptional circumstances. SmartXHosting may pro-rate a refund for major service failures, bereavement of the account holder (to next-of-kin), or other extraordinary circumstances. Contact support to discuss.
If you want to stop paying but keep the address alive for mail forwarding or sentimental reasons, downgrade to Basic (free) instead of cancelling:
- Open service entry in Client Area.
- Click Upgrade/Downgrade.
- Select Basic tier.
- Keep your current username and prefix (prefix premium charge stops if you downgrade to Standard prefix too).
The address remains active indefinitely, free. You keep receiving mail and can sign in whenever needed.
- Within grace period (0-30 days). Contact support. Usually reactivatable with your data intact.
- Post-grace (30-60 days). Data recovery from backup at a per-hour support rate; success not guaranteed.
- After 90 days. The username itself may have been registered by someone else. Your historical data is gone.
For anything important — banking security, government access, domain ownership — do not rely on the grace period.
Cancellation is usually irreversible in practice. Plan it carefully. Treat it like closing a bank account — multi-stage, with backstops, not a one-click decision.
Q: Can I transfer my account to someone else?
A: Contact support. Account-to-account transfer within the same household is usually facilitated; a full third-party assignment requires identity verification and is uncommon.
Q: What if I just want to stop paying but not lose the address?
A: Downgrade to Basic free tier. Keep the address indefinitely at no cost.
Q: Does cancelling delete my Client Area account?
A: No. The Client Area account persists. Only the epost.plus service linked to it closes.
Q: What if I cannot sign in to my Client Area?
A: Use the password-reset flow. If you no longer have access to the recovery email, contact support with identity verification.
Q: Does cancellation notify my contacts?
A: No. Inform them yourself before cancelling. Provide a forwarding period so misaddressed mail can be caught.