Passwords by Mask

CNET Editors' review

by: CNET staff on August 31, 2009

Passwords by Mask is a basic program that allows users to generate random passwords and usernames. Although the program is not particularly attractive, it works well enough as a password generator.

The program's interface is a mess of buttons and is sort of hard to look at. The appearance is somewhat dated and clunky, and it could definitely be better organized. Each button represents one of the potential 20 characters that the generated password can contain. Click on a button, and you can select whether you want each character to be completely random, or a number, upper or lower case letter, special character, etc. Once you've customized the password this way and selected how many characters you want, the program generates your result. The built-in Help file describes the program's features but doesn't really explain how to use them; generally this is okay, as the program is fairly self-explanatory, but there were a few things we could have used some guidance on. The menu labeled Seed, for example, didn't really make sense to us, and the Help file didn't mention it at all. Other than that, though, the program is easy to use.

Passwords by Mask has a 30-day trial period, and the trial version allows users to generate only two passwords at a time. The program installs and uninstalls without issues. We recommend this program to all users; it's not fantastic, but it works fine for a basic password generator.