What is the "plain" authentication_type in the mail program?

Question

Looking at Rails Guides for an email action program , what does “plain” authentication_type mean in smtp_settings ?

Does this mean that my password will be sent to clear? (If this helps, I use gmail as the smtp provider.)

Answer 1

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

However, “One of the drawbacks with using the PLAIN authentication mechanism is that the username and password can be decoded quite easily if someone controls the SMTP connection. For better security, an authentication mechanism called CRAM-MD5 can be used instead "