View All Email Account Passwords in Plesk

On my server, I have several domains and I have corresponding email addresses for a few of them, for example: ses5909@mydomain.com, ses5909@anotherdomain.com, etc. I have come to find that in Plesk if I have a domain that has an email user named ses5909 and I need to make the same username on another domain, they are not allowed to share the same domain. So if I give ses5909@mydomain.com the password: supersneakypw, I cannot give that password to ses5909@anotherdomain, or anyone else that has the same username. This is pretty lame if you ask me. The reason for this is that mail is not handled on the domain level, but rather the username level. That is a whole other issue though.

Well today I needed to get into my mail and I wasn’t at the computer that I run my mail client on so I went to my webmail account. I couldn’t remember the password for the life of me. I tried a few that I commonly use, but no luck. So, I needed to try to find my password. I could have reset it, but I’ve resorted to this in the past and I am just tired of doing that. I needed to find a way to retrieve my password.

So, I logged into mysql as the root admin. I looked through the databases and noticed there was a psa db which I am assuming stands for Plesk Server Administration. I immediately looked for email and finally saw mail. I saw all of the usernames and a quick join with the domains table showed me which column belonged to which domain.

SELECT mail.mail_name, domains.name from mail LEFT OUTER JOIN domains ON domains.id = mail.dom_id;

But, now I needed to find the passwords for these. After some more hunting, I found the accounts table where passwords are stored in plain text. If only I didn’t have 200 to look through. So a query was in order:

SELECT accounts.id, mail.mail_name, accounts.password, domains.name FROM domains LEFT JOIN mail ON domains.id = mail.dom_id LEFT JOIN accounts ON mail.account_id = accounts.id