Friday, October 16, 2009

Apple Mail Password Problem



Grrrowl!



Have you received the dreaded "Enter Password for account..." in Apple Mail? Well, I have and I've tried just about everything to fix the problem. I browsed the Apple Forums for solutions. I tried clicking the "cancel" button, only to have the same problem. I've entered my mail passwords, only to have them "disappear" or not save. I've deleted keychain passwords. I've repaired and verified the keychain. Nothing worked. I repaired the keychain with Mail active and inactive. Still nothing. I restarted after repairing the keychain. Nothing, and the frustration is building.

I may have had a slight breakthrough though. Today, I went to my mail server and changed my password for two of my POP email accounts. I didn't really change the password, I just entered the same password that I had entered before. It appears the password wasn't the same (the number of ***'s didn't match the number of letters and numbers in my password).

When I opened Mail. the POP mail didn't ask for a password this time on those two accounts! :-)

So, let's hope I can fix two more POP mail accounts the same way.

I'm keeping my paws crossed.

Bark at you later,
PJ the dog blogging dog :-)

3 comments:

Anonymous | 7:09 PM

I respectfully don't think your solution gets at the problem. I get this message, then after a few hours I'll "put accounts online" and tell it to fetch mail again and it's good to go... I don't know, perhaps at times the server is rejecting access, the reject is mistakenly taken by 'Mail' as password rejection, but it was really because the server wouldn't honor connection with that account at that time... however, mine has been happening with greater frequency and don't know who to contact since the server and/or apple will just say it's not them.

PeachPoPs | 2:08 PM

Well, it works for some and not for others. Best of luck!

Anonymous | 8:05 PM

I agree with Anonymous, the connection is sometimes rejected and Mail takes it as a password rejection.

When Mail asks for a password, I click cancel. Then I right click on the relevant account and select "get new mail from..." and it usually, already works.

Apple Mail just can't handle rejection. ;-) This bug has been around since OS-X. Too bad there's not a preference setting like: "If the server rejects a connection, just try again in a moment and don't assume it's a password problem".

My 2 cents...
Paul