It’s a problem remembering different passwords for different sites, and writing them all down sort of defeats the purpose, in my opinion. Here’s a quick fix that I’ve been using for a while.

Use two common words and “faro” them together. For FaceBook (for example) you might use Candy and Crush, merged to make CCarnudsyh. The words can be mnemonically recalled by your favorite method, and look like gibberish. When I “have” to change passwords, I just make up new mnemonics.

If you want numbers there are several “self-generating” algorithms. The simplest is numerology based; take two digits and add them together, dropping the tens, and that becomes your third digit. Do the same thing with digits 2 and 3 to make a fourth, 3 and 4 to make 5, and so on. Thus a starting pair of 37 gives you 3707741561785381…..

Mix these techniques together and you have a Gmail password of A2d3d5r8e3s1s and all you have to remember is Address 23.

As stipulated it’s quick and dirty, but it works a treat when Comcast gets pi$$y.

The best passwords contain upper case letters and lower case, numbers and symbols. There are many programs available that will generate random passwords and then "remember" them all for you.

One that works well for me is to use an old Mailing address from childhood. For some reason I remember many of mine.

They might look like:

133BDaisydriveburkton

Now put a symbol in front of that and behind it to make it &133BDaisydriveburkton! and you'd have a pretty solid password.

One technique I've used is to create separate emails for different types of accounts: magic, social, financial, and so forth. Create a base password that you can associate with each account. Then create your account on a web site using the base that goes with the email and add a symbol plus three or four letters associated with the web site. For instance, for the Café: if my base is "magic" I might use magic#caf.

(I know this went beyond the scope of only email passwords, but I had the same issues - partly because I was reusing my passwords on various sites. This helps a bit.)

Ed