Is the email address needed in `.htpasswd`?

As documented in Question567, our wiki can't send mails at the moment (but we're working on that). This means Reset Password is sort of useless and we do that manually by SSH to the server.

But when we use htpasswd to reset a user's password, his email address is also removed from .htpasswd and we must manually re-enter that, too.

Why must the email address be in the .htpasswd file? What happens if the email addresses are not there?

Then the user will not be able to use any mail notifications.

You could use some tool to generate the proper encrypted password and simply replace the password, using htpasswd -n user, and then use your favorite editor to replace the password part of it.

Or use sed or perl: perl -i -ple '$user="HisUsername";$pass="HisEncodedPassword"; s/^$user:[^:]*:/$user:$pass:/o' /path/to/.htpasswd