Secure passwords - OK now?

Hi All

With the 'recent' problems I was fairly comfortable that my account was secure i.e. at the time I used the webmail it was only for a sub mailbox & I run Spybot S&D, AdAware SE Pro and Kaspersky AV. No traceable invaders on my system.

However, the recieved wisdom is to periodically chnage passwords and as my main login is very old but was always of a more secure type i.e. upper & lower case with special characters. (Why the heck they changed to the ludicrous max 5-8 and no mixture of cases or special characters at some stage between when I joined +Net and now amazed me).

So, do the "new" (revived IMO) stronger passwords work OK for both changes to the main username login and the mailboxes?

TIA

Yes.

Yes indeed, this is probably done using a higher encryption scheme such as MD5

There is still no encryption of passwords sent to the mail servers. I'd say that changing the allowed size/makeup of password has had little to do with any form of encryption they may or may not be using in the backend systems. If they are using md5 anywhere they should reconsider as it is not the most solid algorithm and has a number of well known flaws.

According to my sources, Plusnet are going to be making a series of changes to make entire platform secure. Having password encryption with MD5 is much much better than not having it at all. I hope Plusnet will be listening to your input and act accordingly.

Would be nice, a few years late mind you. Maybe they'll also explain why they repeatedly rejected the suggestions of how to secure their email systems for years.