In addition to what Chris mentions. If you can publish via http your
password will be sent encrypted only if the server on the other end is a
Windows server running IIS. FrontPage uses the NTLM authentication scheme
that is built into Windows. Unfortunately, non-MS web servers can't make use
of these encryption and in those cases the password is sent in plain text.
So, publishing via http to IIS = encrypted password, otherwise plain text.