How do I Delete My Password?

How do I get K9 to forget my e-mail password? I have tried changing my password to something bogus but the app is being clever and not forgetting the old one until it gets a new one that works.

I want to delete my password. How?

The entire internet seems to have this idea that authentication should be delegated to my e-mail. I don’t like that, I need to delete my e-mail password from K9. How?

Thanks,

-kb

P.S. No, I am not interested in being told to “find my phone” and wipe it before the bad guys do something bad. No, am not interested in encrypting my phone, I have already done that. I want something very simple here, not a complicated explanation for why I do not want this.

Two places for each account:

Settings
find the account
Fetching email | Incoming Server
Sending email | Outgoing Server

The app doesn’t support not saving the password. It also doesn’t support removing the password without removing the account.

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I used to be able to remove the password, but someone went to some programming effort to make that no longer possible. (If the new password I give doesn’t work, the old password continues to be saved.)

Why?

That password is mine, I should be able to control where it sits. I don’t want my e-mail credentials sitting, live, on my phone. Too much security is dumped onto control of my e-mail account these days…

-kb

Removing the password is not a useful feature. It just leaves the account in a broken state.

Apparently you’ve used this “capability” to simulate the app not saving the password in the past. But that’s just a bad approximation of a “don’t save password” feature. One with really terrible UX.

We didn’t intentionally break your use case. But we certainly won’t spend any time restoring the ability to intentionally break accounts.

PS: xkcd: Workflow

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That’s like saying that having a lockscreen password on my phone isn’t a useful feature, “it just leaves the phone in a broken state”. If someone else picks up my phone I want that person to find it in a “broken state”.

It is a security feature. Lots of websites have started equating access to e-mail as authentication (whether I ask for it or not). And for a long time e-mail has been used widely as a recovery feature, meaning anyone with access to my e-mail can hijack all such accounts. So to have my e-mail password sitting there, on a device that can fall out of my pocket or get snatched in a bar, is dangerous.

There is still a (cumbersome) work-around:

  • Change the password on the server.
  • Set the new password in K9.
  • Change the password again on the server.

But I’ve decided to go with a different solution: Delete K9Mail.

Done.

-kb