We have migrated a significant number of email accounts from our old infrastructure to our robust new infrastructure. In this process we found several email accounts with passwords which did not comply with our password policy.  Weak passwords are easy to crack and we have seen situations where vaild accounts are being used to send spam mail from our servers which has resulted in legitimate mails sent by customers being deferred with a few hosting providers.

To avoid a situation negatively impacting majority of our clients we have decided to reset the password of all accounts with weak passwords on the 8th of December 2011. We have been sending reminder mailers to the users with weak passwords to reset it in compliance with our password policy.

Our Password Policy:

• The password must contain at least 8 characters (and can be up to 32 characters long).
• The password can not contain the email prefix or the domain name in their exact form. For instance, if your email address werejohn@yourdomain.com, then your password can not contain the words john or yourdomain.
• The password must contain at least one alphabet (a-z in upper or lowercase), and at least one numeral (0-9).

In case your password remains unchanged, it will be automatically reset by the system on 8th December. The new password will be sent to the user’s alternate email address.

Feel free to contact our support desk in case of any further queries.

Best practices for setting a password

Make sure you create a unique password to help keep someone from breaking in to your account. Here are a few tips for creating your password, and keeping it safe:

• Never tell anyone your password.
• Never write down your password. Even though your password will look random to others, think of a way to remember it so that you don’t have to write it down.
• Change your password periodically.
• Don’t choose a dictionary word as your password. Be creative.
• Make sure you abide by the password policy - let your password be a combination of diverse characters such as punctuation marks. capital and lowercase letters and numbers. A variety of characters makes it harder for anyone to guess the password.