Plesk transfer - email username format

[ArtOfTheGroove]

Yes, another Plesk to cPanel transfer thread! (I'm making each issue a separate thread for more clarity.)

Again - migrating a dedicated server from Plesk 7.5.1 to a dedi running cPanel 11.24.2 using the cPanel ssh transfer function. This time my questions are regarding email accounts... they are transferring over fine from the Plesk box. Usernames and password are intact - nice!

The difficulty I'm having is with cPanel using the entire email address as the username whereas Plesk just used the actual username - i.e. cPanel: username = name @ domain.com, Plesk: username = name.

The problem is that we have a ton of clients with their mail all setup and working on Outlook, Eudora, etc. I was hoping that the server change would be transparent requiring no intervention from our clients. Now it appears that they are all going to need to get into their email clients and change their usernames to the full email address. Of course they will then need to re-enter their passwords. No big deal, right?

Wrong, the vast majority of these clients are totally computer illiterate. Getting them to dig into their email account settings to enter in the new info correctly will be a huge hassle. I'm not kidding when I say that it may take ten minutes just to get them to shut off their caps lock and get their password typed in correctly. Also, almost none of them know their password... and they never record it anywhere. So we will need to supply them with the info, and we will have between 200 - 300 email accounts to do this with.

Is there a better solution that will keep our clients from having to change their settings?

Thanks!
John T.

[ritontor]

If you've managed to come up with a good solution for this, I'd love to hear it - having basically the same issue myself right now.