Some might say a good password must consist of alphabets, numeric, and special characters. That is not true for all case. Special characters means ~!@#$%^&*()_+-=[]{}\|;’:",./<>?. It’s good to include these characters in your password to make it more secure. However, some softwares don’t accept some special characters. If the software is good enough, you will see an error message to notify "invalid character(s)" during changing your password. By the way, some softwares can’t show you any error message because they don’t maintain the password database by themselves. I found some issues according to this problem.

• Plesk doesn’t accept "(" and ")". You will be notified to choose new one. Since Plesk controls the password database, they are able to prevent you to change password with the new invalid one. However, you can change shell password directly at commandline.
• Dovecot doesn’t accept "[" and "]". You will be notified as wrong password. Unfortunately, Dovecot doesn’t maintain the password database. The authentication is done by PAM and IMAP is not capable to change password by its protocol. This handling is very annoying to me.

Some good passwords are too good for some softwares.

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