How to safely delete an Email Group in VICIdial

Sometimes a queue has outlived its purpose. A campaign ended, a team merged, or a test group is cluttering your list. VICIdial lets you remove an email in-group, but it makes you confirm the action twice on purpose. That second step is a guardrail, because deleting the wrong group can break routing for live work.

Before you delete anything, it helps to know the two-step delete is by design and not a glitch. The first click does not remove the group. It reloads the page and asks you to confirm. Only the second click actually deletes the in-group.

The two-step delete

Open the email group you want to remove and scroll to the bottom of its modification page. If your account is allowed to delete groups, you will see a DELETE THIS IN-GROUP link there. Here is what happens next:

1. Click DELETE THIS IN-GROUP at the bottom of the modification page.
2. The page reloads with a confirmation link at the top of the screen.
3. Click the second DELETE THIS IN-GROUP link to actually remove the group.

If you stop after the first click, nothing is deleted. You can navigate away and the group stays exactly as it was. The system only acts on the second confirmation.

flowchart TD
  A["Open the email group"] --> B["Scroll to bottom of mod page"]
  B --> C["Click DELETE THIS IN-GROUP"]
  C --> D["Page reloads with confirm link on top"]
  D --> E{"Confirm?"}
  E -->|Click second link| F["In-group removed"]
  E -->|Navigate away| G["Group untouched"]

Check the dependencies first

An email group rarely lives alone. A Campaign may allow agents to log into it, and one or more email accounts may direct mail to it. Deleting the group without untangling those first means new mail has nowhere sensible to go and an Agent may no longer be able to log in where they expect. The modification page shows you both lists: the campaigns that allow the group and the email accounts that use it. Read those before you confirm.

If the link is not there at all, deletion is not enabled for your role. That is a permission set by your administrator, not a bug. The same applies to many destructive actions in VICIdial, which keeps a junior Agent from wiping a queue that a whole team relies on.

A safer habit, if you are unsure, is to set the group inactive instead of deleting it. An inactive group stops taking new work but keeps its settings and its Disposition history, so you can turn it back on if you were wrong. Delete only when you are certain the group, and everything pointing at it, is truly done.

If you only want to spin up a near-identical replacement before removing the old one, copying the group first is the cleaner path. For the wider picture of how email queues sit alongside calls, see the inbound email and chat guide. And once you are running real volume across an Ingroup and your email queues, our pricing page covers managed VICIdial plans so you do not maintain the box yourself.