Non-plaintext authentication mechanisms

See Authentication/Mechanisms for explanation of auth mechanisms. Most installations use only plaintext mechanisms, so you can skip this section unless you know you want to use them.

The problem with non-plaintext auth mechanisms is that the password must be stored either in plaintext, or using a mechanism-specific scheme that's incompatible with all other non-plaintext mechanisms. For example if you're going to use CRAM-MD5 authentication, the password needs to be stored in either PLAIN or CRAM-MD5 scheme. If you want to allow both CRAM-MD5 and DIGEST-MD5, the password must be stored in plaintext.

In future it's possible that Dovecot could support multiple passwords in different schemes for a single user.

пс: в переводе не нуждается думаю
пс2: если мы хотим использовать PLAIN or CRAM-MD5 scheme то пароли плаинтекстом хранить не обязательно
если же мы хотим использоват CRAM-MD5 and DIGEST-MD5 то тут обязательно нужно хранить плаинтекстом (особенно в использовании DIGEST-MD5)