Can anyone point out to me the advantages of a plantext or digest-based
password authentication scheme?
Yes. They're easier for the client and server to implement. That's about the only advantage.
(My client started out using plaintext; it took me a few hours to get digest working, mostly because I had to read the man pages for OS X's hashing APIs and because I didn't realize that "SHA-1" and "SHA" are not the same thing.)
By the way, could you get your mailer to stop hardcoding <font size=2> on your messages? That makes the text really tiny and hard to read.
�Jens
