Auto-Cleanup, Auto-Delete & Force Re-verify

The Maintenance tab keeps your store clean by auto-deleting stale verification records, removing abandoned user accounts, and bringing lapsed sign-ups back via re-engagement reminder emails. All three features are off by default and run on background daily crons.

You’ll find them at WooCommerce → Email Verification → Settings → Unverified Users → Maintenance.

WP-Cron note

All three features below, and the Force re-verify batch job further down this page, run on WordPress’s built-in WP-Cron — which only fires when someone visits your site, not on a fixed clock. On a low-traffic store this can make a scheduled task appear to silently not run. If a cron-based feature seems stuck, use its own Run now button to confirm it works, and consider disabling WP_CRON and triggering wp-cron.php from a real system cron for reliable timing.

Setting up automatic maintenance — 43 second walkthrough.

How to Auto-Cleanup Stale Verification Records?

The verification log table stores every email-verification attempt — including bot traffic and abandoned sign-ups. Auto-cleanup deletes the unverified rows after a configurable retention window so the table doesn’t grow unbounded.

Go to WooCommerce → Email Verification → Settings → Unverified Users → Maintenance.
Enable the toggle Auto-cleanup unverified records.
Choose how long to keep pending records under Delete pending records after — 14 days (recommended), 30, 60, or 90 days.
Click Save.
(Optional) Click Run cleanup now to execute immediately instead of waiting for the daily cron.

Note

Only pending records are deleted. Verified records stay forever as proof of verification — there is currently no separate purge path for them, so if you need to remove a specific customer’s data for a GDPR/erasure request, do that manually via their WordPress account and, if applicable, the row in Customer Management.

How to Auto-Delete Unverified User Accounts?

This permanently deletes WordPress user accounts that registered but never verified their email. It’s destructive — but ships with built-in safeguards so you can’t accidentally remove paying customers.

A user is never deleted if any of these are true:

They have at least one order (any status)
They have an active WooCommerce subscription
They have any role other than customer or subscriber
They’ve logged in within the last 30 days (measured from today, not from their registration date)
They actually verified their email

To enable:

Go to WooCommerce → Email Verification → Settings → Unverified Users → Maintenance.
Enable the toggle Auto-delete unverified user accounts. A confirmation modal listing the safeguards will appear — read it and click Enable.
Choose the retention window under Delete after — 30 days (the minimum), 60 days, or 90 days (recommended).
Click Save.
(Strongly recommended) Click Preview affected users to see exactly which users would be deleted on the next run, without deleting anything. This lets you sanity-check the safeguards before turning the cron loose.
Click Run now when you’re ready, or wait for the daily cron.

Important

Always click Preview affected users before the first run. The list shows email, registration date, and role for every candidate. Note that the minimum retention window (30 days) is the same number of days as the recent-login safeguard above, but the two are measured differently — retention counts from when the record was created, the login safeguard counts back from today — so at the 30-day minimum, an account that registered exactly 30 days ago and has never logged in at all can be deleted the moment it crosses the threshold.

How to Send Re-engagement Reminder Emails?

Bring back customers who started signing up but never completed email verification. The plugin emails them at the intervals you choose — 1 hour / 24 hours / 3 days / 7 days after sign-up — with a styled reminder and a one-click button to come back and finish.

Go to WooCommerce → Email Verification → Settings → Unverified Users → Maintenance.
Enable the toggle Send re-engagement reminder emails.
Under Send reminder at, select one or more intervals.
Click Save.
Click Customize email → to edit the subject, heading, body copy, button text, button link, and footer through the email customizer (matches the same workflow as your other CEV emails).
(Optional) Click Send test to email a sample to your admin address before going live.
(Optional) Click Run now to fire the cron immediately.

Note

Each user gets each interval at most once, ever — no spam. Sends are capped at 50 per cron run to protect your SMTP. Reminders go to both registered users and guest checkout entries that exist in the verification log. If reminders aren’t arriving, check spam/junk first, then confirm your site’s outgoing mail is actually being delivered — WordPress’s default mail relies on the server’s mail function, which many hosts throttle; an SMTP plugin is recommended, especially once you’re sending near the 50-per-run cap regularly.

How to Force Re-Verify All Customers?

The Force re-verify all customers tool flips every existing verified customer back to unverified in a single action. This is the recommended cleanup after a spam attack, after installing CEV Pro on a store that already has legacy accounts, or whenever you suspect the accounts list contains bots or stale data.

Read before running

This action has no undo. Before running it, the confirmation dialog only shows you a count of affected customers — not the per-user preview list that the auto-delete tool offers. There is no way to reverse a run afterward except manually re-verifying customers again yourself (e.g. one by one, or with the Verify users email bulk action on Users → All Users), and nothing tracks which customers were affected by a specific run to make that easy after the fact.

Requirements — and the setting people miss

Requires Customer Email Verification Pro to be installed and active, with WooCommerce also active.

This tool does nothing on its own without one more setting

Force re-verify only changes a customer’s status in the database. To actually show a re-verified customer a prompt on their next login, you must separately enable Require unverified logged-in customers to verify, found in Settings under the Login Authentication section. Turning on Login Authentication’s master toggle by itself is not enough — that setting only affects new/unrecognized logins, not customers who were retroactively marked unverified. Without “Require unverified logged-in customers to verify” turned on, a force-re-verified customer is silently marked unverified and is never shown anything — no error, no popup, nothing appears broken, they simply are never asked to re-confirm. Administrators, editors and shop managers are never prompted by this setting either way.

When to use this tool

After a spam attack – if your store was hit with mass bot signups, force re-verify is the fastest way to make every existing account prove ownership again. Real customers re-verify in one click; bots never come back.
On a fresh install over legacy accounts – if you installed CEV Pro on a store that already had thousands of customers, those accounts were never asked to verify. Force re-verify retroactively adds the verification gate.
After a data migration or import – if you bulk-imported customers from another platform and aren’t sure how clean the data is.
Periodic security hygiene – some merchants run it once a year to flush abandoned accounts.

How to run the tool

Go to WooCommerce → Email Verification → Settings → Unverified Users → Maintenance.
Scroll to the Tools card.
Read the description, then click the Force re-verify all customers button.
A confirmation popup will show you how many customers will be affected — administrators, editors and shop managers are excluded from this count. Review the count, then confirm.
The job runs in the background. The card updates with a “Last run” timestamp and a count of how many customers were processed when it finishes.

Force re-verify selected users only

If you only want to re-verify a subset of customers (instead of everyone), you can do it from the WordPress Users screen.

Go to Users → All Users.
Use the checkboxes to select the customers you want to re-verify.
From the Bulk actions dropdown, choose Force re-verify selected users and click Apply.

The selected customers are flipped to unverified using the same logic as the bulk button, including the same requirement above — Require unverified logged-in customers to verify must be on for them to actually see a prompt. Same exclusions apply (administrators, editors and shop managers are skipped silently).

Both the store-wide button and this per-user action log a retroactive_unverify event, visible on the Analytics dashboard.