Security issues: passwords are stored in plaintext

[Steeve McCauley]

Passwords for the mailing list users are stored in plaintext, and mailed to the users each month as "reminders" by default.

Passwords should be hashed securely using modern hashing methods and the password thrown away. Mailing passwords in plaintext is something that was acceptable in 1992, barely. Doing so in 2015 is insane.

At the very least the default setting of mailing out users passwords in plaintext should be eliminated. Password recovery methods should be modernized.

[Mark Sapiro (msapiro)]

This is a well known, long standing issue. See <https://bugs.launchpad.net/mailman/+bug/265179>. It is fixed in Mailman 3. It won't be fixed in Mailman 2.1, but you can stop sending monthly reminders by removing the crontab entry that sends them.