I have a utility which runs at certain intervals. My customer now wishes for it to send an email when the task is completed. They want to be able to control the email address, meaning, they want to be able to enter their SMTP details.This is quite a trivial task, but, the storage of the password is not.When customers log onto a website, I hash it, using a salt but that's simply because I don't need to use the password, however, for email, I will need to send the email, probably in plain text.I accept that sending the password over the network to the SMTP server in plain text is a risk, but that is not the question. I'm more concerned about some one finding the password details in plain text within a text file or a field of a database. I need to offer at least some layer of defense.It is just as simple as encrypting the password as such I can decrypt it?
How to store passwords which need to be re-read
passwords