Saving and Encoding Passwords

[joshhighley@hotmail.com (Josh Highley)]

  I'm writing an Ada program that checks email accounts.  I'm storing the 
user name, password, and other info in a text file that my program references 
on startup.  I obviously don't want to store the password unencoded.  Thus, 
my question is how should I encrypt the password?  Is there an Ada package 
that will do this?  I thought of using the CPU id to encrypt the password, 
but I'm not sure how secure this would be and I haven't found an API function 
or any other method of retrieving the CPU id.  Is there a 
typical/standard/accepted way of encoding passwords?

Thanks,

Josh Highley
joshhighley@hotmail.com