[dlikhten]

"Your password can't be longer than 16 characters."

Well, it failed my test. Sorry. I never trust my emails to small hard to remember passwords. I rather trust them to very large easy to remember/type passwords. Like horses-functional-pickles

Also their capcha, I cannot figure out it, i won't spend more than 2 minutes on capcha

[epistasis]

This threw me off as well. I thought Microsoft was supposed to be security conscious, but putting in small, arbitrary limits in places where they don't belong is not reassuring in the least.

They also make it insanely difficult to use a password manager, as the login page URL redirects from outlook.com to some randomness that's 205 characters long.

[kmfrk]

I can sympathize with it being a preview and all, but the consequence will nevertheless be that there will be a bunch of people out the who will enter <= 16-character-length passwords and forget all about them.

I mean, unless Microsoft explicitly prompt them with a reminder of sorts, when they flip the switch on a sane password length, but what are the odds of that happening?

[codegeek]

"2 minutes on capcha"

That is generous. I dont like to spend more than 30 seconds max on capchas.

[3am_hackernews]

Their captcha is _really_ frustrating. I spent well over 2 mins going through atleast 20 of them. This was the only ugly part of the new Outlook experience though.

[hrktb]

Passwords can't contain some set of characters either, including spaces. Just why....

[sebtoast]

Have you tried the audio version? It's even worse.

[MiguelHudnandez]

I tried the audio version because they kept putting "O" or zero in the captcha and it was too much of a guess. If a captcha is going to mangle characters, it must accept any of the possible valid options.

It's like they pursued test-driven development on the captcha but the only test was whether bots couldn't pass, not whether humans could pass it.

After only three attempts, it told me "You've reached the limit for number of attempts. These limits help us protect against spam from automated programs. You can try again later."

The audio captcha was so terrible that I recorded it to share with others. Oddly enough, when I played back my recording of it, it was easier to understand the "valid" words. That is very curious.

Oddly enough, I just reloaded the captcha page and it dropped me into an account and just won't let me send anything until I pass a captcha. I try every once in a while but any time I solve the captcha it gives me the rate-limiting message.

On a side note, they allowed me to sign in with my passport which does not have a Microsoft-provided e-mail address. The interface seems to presume it's responsible for my other e-mail address.

[fideloper]

Not being able to use my personal method for making unique passwords totally killed creating an account for me as well.