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At work, sometimes I have to send people password reminders. Our experience shows that about half the time when people think they don't remember their password, they're actually mistyping their login name, so our practice is to always send both. But I never know how to introduce it.

Your login credentials are:
Username: jsmith
Password: 123abc

That "doubled" colon just bugs the heck out of me. Is there a better way?

(And before you ask: yes, we send passwords as cleartext, and yes, that's secure enough for our purposes.)

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  • @RegDwight: what's with posting answers as comments? :-)
    – Marthaª
    Nov 12, 2010 at 16:36
  • well, if you absolutely insist (^_^).
    – RegDwigнt
    Nov 12, 2010 at 16:39

2 Answers 2

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I usually write:

Your credentials are as follows.
Username: jsmith
Password: 123abc

Or:

Please use the following credentials.
Username: jsmith
Password: 123abc

Of course, these rewordings still kind of ask for a colon, but at least they can handle a period at all, as opposed to "your credentials are".

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  • I've used the "as follows" version, but it's only marginally more satisfying than the double colon. I'll have to try the "Please use..." version.
    – Marthaª
    Nov 12, 2010 at 16:47
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You don’t necessarily need colons in the list.

My favorite form of the property/value list has right-aligned property names, two spaces, and left aligned values.

Your login credentials are:
  Username  jsmith
  Password  123abc

Of course it looks better with more values.

Your login credentials are:
         Domain  Initech
       Username  jsmith
       Password  123abc
  Password Hint  cba321 spelled backward

A simple table would also look nice, if you are already sending e-mails in rich text or HTML. (I tend to use plain text, but that’s just me.)

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  • This method depends on the recipient's email system reproducing my formatting accurately, which is not dependably the case. In particular, I too prefer sending plain text, but if the recipient's system converts everything to html, the extra whitespace might get lost.
    – Marthaª
    Nov 12, 2010 at 21:31

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