> Since these > passwords are sent by clear-text e-mail you're just not going to be able > to prevent administrators from finding out what they are. Maybe one day > PEM will become widely available and the whole authentication scheme will > change, but with plain text passwords sent over a medium that often > bounces stuff to the postmaster (the postmaster being usually a bored > student who figured this paid more than 7/11), you just have to accept > that security is limited. This is why there are options to disable > password usage and force the use of the "confirm" mechanism. I'm not holding my breath waiting for PEM to become popular, but there are two digital signature systems for email that it would be useful for LISTSERV to support as alternatives to clear text passwords and the fairly secure, but irritating and awkward, confirmation mechanism. One is PGP and the other is S/MIME. A number of vendors are coming out with implementations of S/MIME. Also, PGP will soon support automatic querying of keyservers. Speaking of the confirmation mechanism, it would be nice if, when LISTSERV reached a command requiring confirmation, it simply held the rest of the command stream until the confirmation is completed. Then it could execute the rest of the commands knowing that the confirmation was completed, without asking again. 1.8d's OK BEGIN will be a step in the right direction, but it still requires the user to rememeber to do something extra.