This thread is frustrating. Everyone seems more interested in nitpicking the specifics of what OP is saying and are ignoring that a forum sends you your password (not an automatically generated one) in an email on registration.
MITM attack’s success rate just went to 100%
No, it didn’t. It’s stupid and shouldn’t be done, but all ham nowadays is encrypted.
I know that because I’ve been running my email server for some years now, technically breaking one of the RFCs for not allowing unencrypted connections. Zero email has been missed.
While I agree that likely most SMTP traffic is sent encrypted these days, you simply cannot be sure. Just because you received something over an encrypted connection doesn’t mean that relays in between also used this. The webserver could have handed over the email unencrypted to an SMTP server for all you know. And even if an encrypted connection was used the mail might still have been copied to a log on the SMTP server. Email is unfortunately inherently unsafe.
