Fair enough. I think we agree anyway, I'm just being difficult : ) "Mine doesn't. And yes, if they did, I would not be their customer." Are you sure about tha

Fair enough. I think we agree anyway, I'm just being difficult : ) "Mine doesn't. And yes, if they did, I would not be their customer." Are you sure about that? However would you know? And how would they do telephone banking? I wouldn't expect a bank to store plaintext either, I'd expect them to encrypt it and handle decryption at the terminal. But that's a whole different kettle of fish. "Anyone who has access to the text of the mail at any point in time now has your password." Yeah, there is no way I want my passwords going through email either. That argument was a bit flaky. "avoid the well known problems with digest access authentication such as man in the middle attacks" Your point is valid, but I wanted to respond by saying we're talking mainly about large-scale DB theft, 99 times out of 100 done by an insider. You seem to have experience inside a large organisation so you will know that often, SSL terminates at the load balancer, a password form will pass into the server from the balancer in plaintext. If there's an attacker on the inside, he can sniff that to his heart's content. You could argue Digest is actually more secure in this setting. Toss up between more security on the user's LAN/WLAN (SSL) and more security inside the DC (Digest).. OK, this is a bit whimsical. "All of the clusters I have access to only work by virtue of X509 client certificates over SSL" Me too, actually. But, sadly, that's not appropriate for the public at large. Anyway, I agree it's a red flag, just trying to make a point that it's not as black and white as it seemed you were suggesting. There can be good reasons to store in plaintext, and if it's carefully implemented I don't have a problem with it. As long as it's an informed choice, and not just a naive default, and that goes the other way as well.