It’s definitely not the first time that I ran into this situation; A user was added to the website without checking the “Skip confirmation email” checkbox. Now, we’d like to force this user into the website and just send a login and password over, but now we get the message:

That email address has already been used. Please check your inbox for an activation email. It will become available in a couple of days if you do nothing.

We don’t have a couple of days to wait, and we don’t want to use another e-mail address either. So what do we do?

Note: This is a developer oriented approach for deleting pending users. If you’re not comfortable with WP-CLI or database changes, have a look at the Uncomfirmed plugin.

Let’s go with WP-CLI

Let’s dive into the database

But honestly – I’d rather leave the database untouched. I rarely touch WordPress databases and prefer to do any interaction with the database via code and terminal.

So let’s use WP CLI as a wrapper instead!

So, first off – where are these pending activations stored? They’re in the wp_signups table.

Let’s have a look at all pending activations first:

wp db query "SELECT * FROM wp_signups"

Now that we confirmed that the user is in there, let’s specify the query further;

wp db query "SELECT * FROM wp_signups WHERE user_email = '{USER_EMAIL}'"

(you can use any other data and column as well, the first command will give you all information.)

Okay, so we nailed down the user – now, it’s time for deletion, we’ll change the query a bit, and execute the deletion with the following command.

The WP-CLI command to delete a pending user from the database

wp db query "DELETE FROM wp_signups WHERE user_email = {USER_EMAIL}"

And there you go – the e-mail address is free to use again!