Knowledgebase
How to configure the system customer settings in Magento
In addition to creating and managing customers and customer groups there are also some system settings related to customer accounts. In this article we'll briefly outline these settings. For basic information on customers check out the article on managing customers in Magento.
To configure the system customer settings log in to the admin panel of your Magento and go to System>Configuration>Customer Configuration button in the Customers section on the left. Some panels with options will appear on the right. The first panel is Account Sharing Options and it contains a settings which you can use to select whether customer accounts should be shared globally or only per website (useful option if you have a multistore). The next panel is Online Customers Options and it also has a single setting. It's called Online Minutes Interval and you can use it to specify how often should the list accessible at Customers>Online Customers be refreshed.
The panel Create New Account Options has settings related to customer registration. From the Default Group drop-down menu you can select the customer group to which newly registered customers are assigned. From the drop-down menus Default Welcome Email, Confirmation Link Email and Welcome Email you can select respectively the email template used for welcome messages sent to new customers, for the confirmation link emails (only if email verification is enabled), and for the welcome email that's sent after email confirmation is successfully completed. You can enable email verification from the Require Emails Confirmation drop-down menu.
From the panel Password Options you can change the template used for forgot your password emails, you can select the email address that should appear in the From field of such emails and you can change the expiration period of password recovery links. The Name and Address Options panel is useful if you want to add fields to the pages on the frontend where name and address options appear (e.g. registration form, customer accounts, checkout). You can add a field for a prefix (e.g. Mr., Mrs., etc.), you can add a field for middle name initials, you can also add a field for a suffix (e.g. Jr., Sr.,), for the date of birth and gender of the customer.
The panel Login Options has a single setting called Redirect Customer to Account Dashboard after Logging in. The name is self-explanatory; you can choose whether after logging in the customer should be redirected to the dashboard of their account or whether they should be returned to the page they were viewing prior to logging in. The Address Templates panel can be used for editing the address templates; it's not recommended to do this.
The CAPTCHA panel has an option for enabling CAPTCHA (visual tasks for stopping spam bots). It's disabled by default. If you enable it some more settings will appear which you can use to manage various aspects of CAPTCHA, such as the pages on which it should appear, the number of symbols shown in each visual task, the allowed symbols, etc.
For screenshots and more details read the tutorial on customer configuration in Magento.