Changing Customer Password

Sometimes I get customers who cannot login to their accounts. Some of these customers can successfully use the reset email password but others continue to have issues even after doing reset password.
I have tried going into phpadmin and changing the customer password using the MD5 option. When I look back at the password after hitting go it shows encryption but still doesn't work. I have noticed the passwords on the other accounts have a : and 2 more characters but the ones I change do not have this.

Can someone please help me with this. I am tired of losing customers over this issue

mysh:

Sometimes I get customers who cannot login to their accounts. Some of these customers can successfully use the reset email password but others continue to have issues even after doing reset password.
I have tried going into phpadmin and changing the customer password using the MD5 option. When I look back at the password after hitting go it shows encryption but still doesn't work. I have noticed the passwords on the other accounts have a : and 2 more characters but the ones I change do not have this.

Can someone please help me with this. I am tired of losing customers over this issueLots of these problems happen because they first make a typo entering their password and get the error page. They try again with the correct password but they then get the same error page because the browser they are using is caching the error page.

Trying to talk customers thru how to "clear their cache" is normally very difficult.

They then repeatedly send themselves a new password and expect all of them to work.

You can change their email to yourself.
Send yourself a new password.
Change the email back to them.
Try yourself that their email address and the new password "work"
Them email them the new password and suggest they "cut and paste" it into the password field.

If they cannot get that to work then you have confirmed that it is a caching problem.
If they cannot clear their cache then they can try a different computer.
(eventually the cache will expire itself but it can take a couple of days for some)

Passwords are MD5+SALT, so you can't merely run an md5 function on them and stuff them into the database. Salting makes it more secure than that. As of v1.5.0 there is no feature built-in for the storeowner to mess with customer passwords, with or without their permission.

As gilby said above, for the rare occasion when it's necessary, you could probably temporarily change their email address to one of yours, then do a reset, and then change the email address back.

For those customers who cannot login using the password that's emailed to them, chances are their problem isn't the password but rather something amuck in their browser.

After posting this I actually tried the email trick and that worked for me. thanks for the replies. I do wonder what happens sometimes. I know somethings are customer error but sometimes it seems like some other bug is happening