Interesting question: how to safely keep passwords online

Here's a question that's been on my mind lately: Often, you like to keep external passwords stored on your personal computer. As a quick example, Eudora will remember your POP password for you so you don't have to enter it every time. Obviously, Eudora keeps this on disk somewhere. The question is: is there any (relatively) safe way to do this? Obviously, Eudora encrypt the saved password with some secret key, but this key could probably be found by examining the code. A slight improvement would be for Eudora to generate an encryption key on the fly based on some external system state, but this is also susceptible to reverse-engineering. -ed falk