PASSWORD TOO LONG PROBLEM

fireking

New Email
Hello everyone, hope everyone is well.

i have a problem with my hotmail account which i cannot suss out.

Each time i go to sign in the password characters stop at 15 and my password is 19 letters long. I have been using this password for some time now and have only started having this problem. Please could someone help as i really need this email account.

I also cannot remember my secret question?:confused:

this site has some excellent helpfull posts GOOD JOB!!

thanks

Bill
 

EQ Admin

EQ Forum Admin
Staff member
Hi Bill,

Did you have any luck getting access to your account.

I did send a message to Hotmail but did not receive a response yet.

I also tried a post on their boards while seem to be closed down more or less now.

Were you able to get to your email by setting up pop3 access to your account?

-Raymond
 

Big Dan

EQ Forum Moderator
I figured out through trial and error that Hotmail/MSN/Live silently truncates passwords somewhere in the neighborhood of 12 characters.

It's not a problem when logging into Hotmail or Windows Live Messenger because the over limit characters seem to be truncated automatically by the server thus login is allowed.

This is a poor policy. At the very least Hotmail should throw an error that your password is to long and force you to choose a shorter one. Even then it's still a poor practice because there is no harm in having a longer password, in fact one could argue it's more secure.

It is however a problem for 3rd party clients like Pidgin, Trillian, Adium, etc as they don't truncate before sending it to the server I found out about this hard way and blogged about it. http://www.bigdan.us/on-the-interne...ord-is-frustrating-with-arbitrary-limits.html
 

Big Dan

EQ Forum Moderator
It's 16. Figured it out in later threads.

-Raymond

Oh cool, thought it was a little lower but you're right. :) Why couldn't you tell me this before hand? I was pulling my hair out trying to figure out why I couldn't login with Trillian. :p

For my part I think 16 is sufficient but extra characters still shouldn't be silently discarded it should throw an error to let the user know what's going on.

AOL/AIM is even worse. I forget the character limit but it's no where near as generous.
 

EQ Admin

EQ Forum Admin
Staff member
The problem with Hotmail is that they used to allow longer passwords and apparently later knocked it down to a max of 16 locking out everyone who had a longer password.
 
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