Password Guidelines

Applies to: Office 365 for professionals and small businesses, Office 365 for enterprises, Live@edu

Topic last modified: 2011-10-03

The following rules and restrictions apply to account passwords.

Password rules

• The password can have a maximum length of 16 characters.
  
• The password is case-sensitive.
  
• The password can contain uppercase letters and lowercase letters.
  
• The password can contain numbers.
  
• The password can contain the following ASCII text characters: ` ~ ! @ # $ % ^ & * ( ) _ + - = { } | [ ] \ : " ; ' < > ? , . /
  

Password restrictions

The password can't contain any of the following items:

• Spaces
  
• Non-English characters
  
• The account name part of the e-mail address. For example, if the e-mail address is user@contoso.com, the password can't contain user. This restriction isn't case-sensitive. Therefore, USER or User can't be used in the password for user@contoso.com.