So I clicked the box for custom logins and changed the login name to 'name.place', but it changed my email address as well... It was
name@domain.com and now it is
name.place@mail.domain.com
I looked around at some posts on here that seemed to deal with similar issues but they all seem to be over my head. I tried one that mentioned changing the userdb (which seemed to have already been changed) in dovecot.conf and the user_query line in dovecot-sql.conf, afterwhich I got a replication error. So obviously I read something wrong and screwed that up, but it is easily fixable.
Honestly (if you can't tell already) I don't know anything about dovecot and have no clue if what I had read was the right thing or not.
Ideally I would be able to stick to the user.place scheme as the login, but I am starting to get a headache from messing with this