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I've been struggling with Postfix for past few days. Finally I managed to set it up with virtual mailboxes listed in MySQL and passwords encrypted with PAM. It was just then that I realized I need the passwords to be stored not-encrypted!

I can't seem to find whether it's possible or not. Can someone please guide me to the right direction?

[UPDATE]

To explain myself, I'm making a web application and I want the same username and password of a user to be his email's too. So I configured Postfix and Courier to use my webapp's database so users come with an email address once they have an account in the webapp. The thing is, I need to access users' inboxes in the webapp so I have to be able to pass the clear form of users' password through IMAP protocol to Courier in my code. That's why I need all of the parties to use a clear form of password.

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  • PAM uses encryption libraries to do its encryption (Blowfish, MD5, etc), I'm not sure what the default encryption library is (linux_crypt maybe)?
    – NickW
    May 23, 2014 at 14:38
  • The thing is, I want it to use no encryption at all! I want the passwords to be stored and later compared as they are, in clear form.
    – Mehran
    May 23, 2014 at 14:40
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    Storing plain text passwords is a horrible, horrible idea. Do you mean you want to be able to use plain text passwords in POP3/IMAP/SMTPAuth ?
    – NickW
    May 23, 2014 at 14:43
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    By taking the user input, comparing it to the DB, then passing the user input to the server if it matches. Doesn't require plaintext in the DB..
    – NickW
    May 23, 2014 at 15:48
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    @Mehran very happy that I persuaded you to avoid plaintext passwords in the DB :)
    – NickW
    May 23, 2014 at 16:34

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As Nick told me, it is a bad practice to store passwords in clear form in database. I managed to find a way around it so I'll be storing passwords encrypted after all. But if there's any scenario that can not escape this bad practice, I must say that my tests showed me that even though I configured Postfix to use PAM for encryption but when I stored passwords in clear form, they would still be matched!

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