About our new password system

The password system upgrade we released to the majority of Emma customers last week is designed to keep you and the rest of the Emma community as secure as possible. Providing great service means providing secure service, and these password system changes are an important part of protecting your data.

Of course, we know that managing a growing list of increasingly complex passwords is challenging (and can be frustrating, too.) We thought we’d share a bit more insight into why complex passwords matter and how to make managing them a little easier.

Why the password complexity?
We love keeping things simple here at Emma, but complex passwords are harder to crack — and that’s important. Online security for companies like us is a layered system, and we’re working on all of those layers, all the time. This password system is one of those layers, and having complex passwords in place gives us extra time to manage and contain any security breach that may occur.

For example, a password with eight characters using just numbers is easy to crack — it would take an average hacker about 10 seconds. If you take that same eight-character limit but use upper and lower case alphabetical characters, that password would take 62 days at most to crack. Add numbers to the mix, and you end up with about 253 days at most. This estimated timeframe goes out to 23 years if you add in punctuation characters. (And while 23 years may seem excessive, we’re planning for a future that certainly holds faster computers, more powerful cracking programs and more persistent and skilled hackers.)

Pairing these new complex passwords with Emma’s already sophisticated encryption makes it extremely difficult for any hacker to decipher passwords, giving us time to address any security incidents that happen and protect the entire Emma community in the process.

Password details and tips
Your new password will contain at least eight characters, including a combination of capital and lowercase letters, as well as at least one number and one symbol. And just because a password has to be secure, it doesn’t have to be difficult to remember. Try a word that’s familiar to you, and then meet the security requirements by adding symbols and punctuation. Or take the first letters from a familiar phrase or some song lyrics, and then substitute some of the letters for those more secure elements. (See more tips for creating and remembering complex passwords.)

We also recommend that you change your password at least twice a year … maybe when the time change happens and you’re checking the batteries in your smoke detector. It’s also a very good idea *not* to use the same password you use for other sites. If it’s helpful, you can use a password vault application. These handy programs let you store and organize all your passwords in one place and access them with one master password. Some folks use KeePass, for example — if you’ve got a favorite, tell us about it in the comments.

Thanks for understanding. We appreciate every single member of our Emma community, and we know that you’re trusting us with an important part of your organization. We want to do all we can to honor that trust and work with you to create even more email marketing greatness.