Passwords: special characters? which ones?

Hi, I've my ISPConfig box up and running.
I'm concerned about which passwords shouldn't use any special character.

My MySQL root password DOES, and it's working just fine. The password contains these characters: @#$
I've got some websites/email running, no problems at all.
Should I have any problem ?

I have also some system users who were added by hand (nothing to do with the ISPConfig system), whose passwords contain special chars like @ # $, and they can log in fine (as usually in any linux system).

On the other hand, in one of those websites I created a user (through the ISPConfig web interface), say user1, with a password like: aaaaaaa-8888aa
So, a word (7 chars), a dash, a number, and another word.
The password is being cut at the dash, I can login in the system, in the webmail and through the pop3 server using just: aaaaaaa-
Furthermore, if I add anything next to the dash I still can login, too.

Now, I have another user with a similar password, but the first word, instead of 7 chars, it has just two chars, a dash and a number. It's like this: aa-8888
The problem described above does not apply to this user. Weird!

Can anyone of you explain me why is this happening ? Which are the restrictions in the password within the ISPConfig system ? To which users do they apply ?
The strange thing is that my ISPConfig admin has a password with special chars, and it works fine !!

Thanks in advance.

 

I've been playing around..
Does ISPConfig cut your password at 8 characters ?
Now I figured out that any user can login with the first 8 chars of his/her password.

Any tips ?

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UPDATE: So, now that I figured this out, I did some searching on the forum and found this thread:
http://www.howtoforge.com/forums/showthread.php?t=2385&highlight=password+length
It states that ISPConfig cut the password to 8 chars, but that it'll be fixed in 2.1.3 release. I'm using 2.2.12, so it should be working with long passwords, right ? It might be a config issue, but I've followed the perfect setup for CentOS 5, and the change just a few lines in dovecot.conf to be able to login with [email protected] string (it's working).


Besides that, I still want to know which are those special chars which shouldn't be used, and where ? (because, as I've said, my ISPConfig web interface admin user has a password with @, # and $, working just fine).
Any info would be greatly appreciated.