Changing your password using WebMail

To change your mail.rochester.edu password using the web:

1. Go to the WebMail login page at https://mail.rochester.edu .
2. Click on the link to "Change your password".
3. A window will appear in which you must type:
   1. Your user id (e.g. aa001x)
   2. Your current password for mail.rochester.edu
   3. Your new password, which must meet the following criteria:
      • between 6 and 8 characters long
      • have at least 2 alphabetic characters and at least one non-alphabetic character
      • differ from the old password by at least 3 characters
   4. Confirmation of your new password.
4. Click "Send it" to submit your password change.
5. If you receive an error message, you can try again, or you will need to log in to the server to attempt the change again.

NOTE: If you are experiencing problems creating an acceptable password please check out the rules for good email passwords below

Rules for good email account passwords:

• Passwords cannot be changed more than once within a calendar day
• Old & new passwords cannot be the same
• Passwords should be between 6-8 characters long
• Passwords should not contain any contiguous part of your full name or your email account username
• Your new password should differ from your old password by at least 3 characters

Email account passwords should contain three of the following four attributes:

• One or more characters should be uppercase ( A-Z )
• One or more characters should be lowercase ( a-z )
• One or more characters should be a number ( 0-9 )
• One or more characters should be special characters or punctuation ( ! @ # $ % ^ & * ( ) _ . , + < > )

Bad passwords:

• Any word that appears in a dictionary (ie. English, or other foreign language)
• Words that refer to things that others may know about you (ie. name of your spouse, children, pets, favorite sports team, favorite literary character)
• Anything that can be easily guessed about you (ie. name, userid, PID, or any variation thereof)
• Anything that can be determined about you (ie. anniversary dates, birth dates, addresses, phone numbers)
• Keyboard shortcuts (ie. ASDFG or QWERTY)
• Sequences of characters or numbers (ie. ABCDEF, FEDCBA, 123456, 654321)

Good passwords can be created by (please do not use the examples cited here):

• Using the first letter of a phrase that you remember
  • "I sure do love my spouse!" becomes Isd0lms!
  • "A stitch in time saves nine" becomes Asit!m3s9
  • "The quick brown fox jumped over the lazy dogs" becomes Tqbfj0tld$
• Combining two words that don't normally go together and separating them by a number/special character and changing some letters to numbers/special characters
  • star and frog becomes star7Fr()g
  • water and camel becomes w@ter4Came!
• Creating nonsense words by eliminating vowels
  • Copyright Law becomes c0pyr!ghtLw

You can maintain password security by:

• Not using your UR email account password for anything outside of UR
• Changing your password at regular intervals
• Never sharing your password with others
• Never writing your password down, however, if you need to, treat it as you would a credit card; place that paper in your wallet, not taped to your computer monitor
• Never keeping your passwords in a file on your computer, instead consider a computer application from a reputable security software provider specifically designed for storing passwords