Link to cPanel webmail login with username prepopulated

[rlesterphx]

I'm trying to provide a link for clients to easily access their webmail by a link like:
clientdomain.com/webmail
which works fine, and I disabled the http authentication so they don't get the ugly popup login prompt.

But I've tried seemingly every combination of URLs and I can't seem to get the webmail login page to load with the username pre-populated like it does when you click the "Access Webmail" link from within cPanel, which opens a not-so-friendly link like:
mydomain.com:2082/frontend/x3/mail/webmailform.html?user=account@clientdomain.com&domain=clientdomain.com

Is there an easy way to do this without creating a custom login form? Thanks!

[rlesterphx]

Bumping this thread...I still haven't figured this one out. Does anyone know? Thanks

[Infopro]

That "ugly popup login prompt" is a security feature and not ugly at all. It's the recommended best way to go, IMHO.

There is no way to login directly to your email that I'm aware of.

Users these days login more via cell phones or email clients (IMAP or POP3 accounts) than webmail. And when they login to webmail, you would think they'd want to be sure that they are on a secured connection.

In my experience, explaining to a user that he can get to webmail with a nice short URL like hisdomain.com/webmail/ is all he needs to know. Once that URL is typed in and he's forwarded to the secure connection, who cares what the URL looks like?

You want your users connecting to your server to be connecting via a secure connection as often as possible. You never know where they are connecting from, or who's listening to (watching) them connecting.

[rlesterphx]

Thanks for the follow-up, Infopro.
I was actually asking about just pre-populating the username (not the password too or auto-logging them in). I guess you're right though about just giving them the short URL for the webmail and letting them do it... I was just trying to make it a smoother experience for users (especially the less technically-inclined who end up calling in to support because they're trying to log in with "username" instead of "username@clientdomain.com").

We'll have to agree to disagree about the popup login prompt though...I still think those things are ugly!
As far as security, I was under the impression when I disabled it in WHM (checked the "Disable Http Authentication for cPanel/WebMail/WHM Logins" setting) that it was a security improvement to disable it. It says "This will help prevent certain types of XSRF attacks that rely on cached Http Auth credentials."

Thanks again!

[rlesterphx]

Also, like I mentioned cPanel already does what I'm talking about with the "Access Webmail" link, like:

http://mysite.com:2082/cpsess1234/frontend/x3/mail/webmailform.html?user=user@theirsite.com&domain=theirsite.com

I just want a more friendly link like:

http://theirsite.com/webmail/?user=user@theirsite.com

(obviously that doesn't work but something similar)