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839. What characters can I use in my password?
There are some simple rules that you must follow when changing your password:
- Your password must be exactly 8 characters long.
- It must start with a letter.
- Remember that UPPERCASE letters are different from lowercase letters (for example, A is treated as different from a).
- It must contain at least one character that is not a letter, such as a digit.
For most people at the University of Sussex (but not BSMS), the following characters are permitted when changing your password with the My Accounts web interface:
| curly brackets | { } | round brackets | ( ) | square brackets | [ ] | ||
| hash | # | colon | : | semi-colon | ; | ||
| comma | , | full-stop | . | question mark | ? | ||
| exclamation mark | ! | bar or pipe | | | mathematical symbols | = + - * | ||
| underscore | _ | backtick | ` | tilde | ~ | ||
| at | @ | dollar | $ | percent | % | ||
| caret | ^ | ||||||
If you are a BSMS student you should not use any of the above "special" characters, for consistency with the passwords permitted by the University of Brighton.
The following characters are permitted in all passwords:
- Uppercase [A-Z] and lowercase [a-z] English alphabet characters
- Digits 0-9
You must not use any of the following characters:
- Back slash: \
- Forward slash: /
- Single quote or apostrophe: '
- Double quote: "
- Any accented or non-english alphabetic characters: ü î ø å é etc.
The following characters cause problems for some systems and should be avoided:
- ampersand: &
- 'greater than': >
- 'less than': <
To test how secure (or not) your proposed choice of password is, try the Microsoft Password Checker website.
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This is question number 839, which appears in following categories:
created on 2001-08-14 by Roger Discombe
last updated on 2012-02-28 by Andy Clews