I Told You This Was Going To Happen

It’s Password Day!  My email password is no longer P1x13Du$t

Oh man...that was going to be my next guess in a brute force attempt to hack into your email account.  I'm interested in all of those meeting notices you get.

Sorry, but you won't be hacking into my email.  Of course, it's at this point in Password Day that I always feel the need to point out that neither this, nor any of my Password Day posts were ever used as my email password.  In this particular case, I'm not even sure if I could, what with the gratuitous use of a non-alphanumeric character.  It may or may not be allowed...which is something I feel comfortable saying without compromising my company's email security.  You see...adding symbols like a dollar sign and such would add about 20 or so characters to an available list of 36.  

Sure, on the surface, it seems like a big difference, but let's do the math!  If you assume I use an 8-character password (not necessarily a valid assumption, but most password systems everywhere these days require at least 8 characters, so we'll go with this as a minimum), you end up with somewhere in the neighborhood of 2,800,000,000,000 possible passwords.  Allowing non-alphanumeric characters pushes that number to a little under 97,000,000,000,000.  See, once you get that many zeros in the picture (We're talking about Trillions, here...12 zeros), the difference between 2 and 97 flattens out a little bit.