password problem with 10.4.11 (Eudora 6.2.4)

I'm certainly familiar with Eudora, and not Mac Mail, but people have told me Mail is the best... And Comcast is more likely to support Mail! I planned to read up on Mail in "Tiger: The Missing Manual."

I opened Keychain Access in Applications>Utilities, and I've been unable to find a key that is associated with Eudora, or any mail account!

I looked in Eudora settings>Personalities, and there's no ability to modify the name "<<Dominant>>". Do you mean to add a space after my username? I tried that, got the same result. When I went back to remove the space, it didn't seem to have been saved in the Settings....

I neglected to say that with my old Mac, the login/password handshake was automatic. And I never had to give the password more than once. With OSX, the system seems to want my password frequently! Since I'm the only user on my computer, this is kind of a pain in the ***! I suppose this might be user-definable, but I haven't yet figured out how...

Thanks!

I'm pretty sure I imported everything of importance EXCEPT the settings. I put in the appropriate settings by hand, as best as I could. (Settings options changed somewhat between versions. Comcast offers NO support for Eudora...)

I checked "remember password", but Eudora doesn't seem to. And OSX seems to be (separate dialog box) denying my password.

Well, it's not getting through to Comcast at all, either Username,
Password, Port number, or SMTP settings or such...

Right.

The settings should be the same as Mail or Outlook, or any other
Mail App... just different places & terminology,

Perhaps they should, but the "places & terminology" might be an easy translation for a Net technical wizard, not for me.

I have used Eudora, as I described, in OS9 for MANY years, and the settings were fine. I use Comcast ONLY for sending email and access to the Net, I have my own mail server, so Comcast's FAQs are virtually no help, since they don't apply to the places and terminology of Eudora 6.2.4.

I'm using pretty much the same settings as I used on my OS9 system (Eudora 6.1). The problem remains, as I originally described, to be some barrier related to password, and limited to my iBook. I suspect OSX, not Eudora, as the password dialog is similar to other password dialog boxes OSX is repetitively throwing at me. Also, I doubt that Eudora is giving me the error and "too many attempts" dialog boxes: Eudora would probably just attempt to send the email, and let my mail server refuse the password, which it's obviously never getting the chance to do.

The problem is with the keychain login, which I have to believe is an OSX problem, not Eudora.

I just tried to set up Mac Mail, and since Comcast doesn't post an FAQ for the version I have, I spent an hour talking to two different support people, trying to get the setup properly done. As I was completing the setup, Mail tried to check the setup with Comcast's outgoing mail server, and it gave me the SAME keychain password dialog box as I have gotten when trying to use Eudora, and the same failed password error message.

(The one difference is that Mail confirmed the incoming mail server username and password.)

Since I can't find any Keychain related to what I'm doing, I've tried to check the only others I see. I tried to view the Safari Autofill keychain/password, and it asks me for a login.keychain password. I gave the ONLY password I've ever used on this computer, and it gives me the error message again. Like I said, there's a problem with OSX, and I can't figure out how to get past a password that I obviously didn't create, or may not even exist on my computer!

I don't know what else to tell here....

I opened Keychain Access, but there is nothing called "Windows" or "Keychain First Aid"

Yes, Eudora is set to Port 587 (something I couldn't configure with 6.1 on OS9). There is nothing called "Authentication", but there is a checked box for "Allow Authorization."

I've checked Eudora's FAQs, and they claim that it's the ISP kicking back the password for Comcast's SMTP server. (Since I'm a roommate, it's not my account. Comcast is starting to force everyone to use the Account Holder's username and password. So my incoming mail server password (and username) is different from what OSX is probably trying to confirm, and is the source of this problem.

After talking to the Comcast support person, they suggested I try setting up Mac Mail WITHOUT using Authentication, and see if that might work ... for a while. Like many things I'm finding in OSX, it wouldn't work. Later, Mac Mail automatically downloaded all the mail on my server without my asking it to.

I'm about to give up on Eudora, and just TRY to get Mac Mail set up as my only mail program (since I can now send and receive with it). I tried to import ALL my mail (2 years worth), and Mail finally crashed before completing. For some reason, Mail won't automatically grab the Eudora address book contents, Help says to export the contents in a specific format. But I can't find any such option in Eudora. I'm waiting to get approval to post my question in Eudora Forums....

Hopefully, I'll get ONE of these mail programs to work **** soon! I'm quite disgusted with how difficult and problematic so many things have been in OSX. It's like I'm using a Windoze PC. I'm NOT a happy camper. ;-(

Apologies, I JUST figured out what you were trying to get me to do in Keychain Access. I started 'repair', and got the following:

...
Checking keychain configuration for Ric Lobosco (user ID=501)
...
User differs on ~/Library/Preferences/com.apple.security.plist, should be 501, owner is 0
...

Verification failed, as did the repair. It appears I not only have a Comcast problem to solve, but as I originally suspected, an OSX problem.

So how do I fix this mess? I'm not sure what other problems are now lurking!!!

...I'm only getting through perhaps 10 pages a week in Pogue's "Tiger: the Missing Manual." And I'm sure I never would have gotten this far with this problem with that book, since I didn't know where to look for this set of problems! ;-(

Thanks, BDA, and apologies for the delay in getting back to your last message! (Busy several days.)

If I understand your message, there are two routes. Regarding the 2nd, I CAN "Get Info>Ownership & Permissions>Unlock", but not sure what to do next...

If it's all one process, and I use Disk Utility, is this something that requires I should back up my data or my whole system first??? (I don't want to start this without being clear about these things!)

BTW, this might be of use to someone else: I discovered the importing of address book data from Eudora to Mail is problematic: Mail cannot simply import it, as it can the mailboxes (mail files).
It requires first exporting a CSV file from Eudora, and I can't 'sync' the fields to the OSX Address Book (which apparently IS the Mail address book). I stumbled onto Eudora Mailbox cleaner, which supposedly will import whatever one likes from Eudora (or Thunderbird) to mail: address book, mailboxes, filters... I have downloaded it, but not yet tried it.

For all the kudos I hear about Mac Mail, I have discovered at least two simple and obvious things that it doesn't do.....

OK, unlocked, changed to me (as User) -- allows me to read and write -- and locked it again.

Now I back up, then use the Disk Utility procedure you described?

OK, backed up, ran Repair Permissions, moved the file to the desktop. I'll be ******, the screen image I selected showed back up! 😉

Do I do something else now?
What do I do with com.apple.security.plist?
How often does some corruption like this happen with OSX???

I still can't send email from Eudora (failed password again), but I believe that's a security measure that Comcast has put in place.... Won't know until I sort out that question.