What is the "plain" authentication_type in mailer?

Question

Looking at the Rails Guides for action mailer, what does the "plain" authentication_type mean in the action mailer smtp_settings?

Does it mean that my password will be sent in the clear? (If it helps, I am using gmail as the smtp provider.)

Semidome

Answer 1

According to this article "although the keyword PLAIN is used, the username and password are not sent as plain text over the Internet - they are always BASE64 encoded"

However "One drawback using the PLAIN authentication mechanism is that the username and password can be decoded quite easy if somebody monitors the SMTP communication. To obtain higher security an authentication mechanism with the name CRAM-MD5 can be used instead."

Mellicent