Excessive Apple ID password requests and login issues

tutlek wrote:

I appreciate your response, but do not understand it.

Could you please elaborate with an explanation and perhaps an example?

Thanks.

Email apps have one or variously more accounts configured.

Email accounts have two sets of credentials, each composed of a user and password. One set of credentials is used for sending email messages (SMTP, ESMTP), and one for receiving (POP, IMAP) messges.

It is possible that some mail app somewhere has gotten a bad set of credentials, either because the credentials were not updated to reflect an Apple Account password change. or because of a corruption.

If this arises, the mail client won’t work (for either send or for receive, or for both) for that account, but it’ll retry, and that (failing) retry can potentially get the Apple Account blocked.

These mail clients with stale or corrupted credentials can be on a seldom-used but still active computer of yours, or on a seldom-used iPad or iPhone that is still powered on and set to poll for email updates.

Apple Account credentials in Apple clients don’t usually explicitly have a user and password, but accessing an Apple email account from another or an older client can have these credentials, as can a mail client configured to access your Apple Account as a second account unrelated to the Apple Account used on that computer/device.

I was referring to a login failure of an email app email account at Apple, and using Apple credentials.

Yahoo does their own thing, and login failures at Yahoo are not reflected on an Apple Account login failure.

Which means it probably isn’t email, though here can still be some apps with those Apple credentials.

Apple also went to app-specific passwords.

But if your issue is broader than one Apple Account failure, that might mean that iCloud Keychain is somehow more generally corrupted, or might mean your network connection is encountering communications errors.

I’ve chased similar iCloud Keychain cases on two occasions (which I suspect were secondary to network errors), and the fix was to disable iCloud Keychain everywhere, wait a few minutes for it to all update, shut down everything cleanly, wait a few minutes, restart one device and enable iCloud Keychain on it, and then incrementally restart the other devices and reenabling iCloud Keychain on each.

Network errors mean a discussion with your ISP.

No, use of an old Yahoo account is itself not an issue, as I’ve been using a non-Apple domain for about as long as you have here, on an Apple Account that started out with the pre-email-syntax Apple Account.

Look for (for instance) an email account configuration of yours still configured for an old password.

Those sorts of persistent login failures can get an Apple Account locked.

I'm having this exact same problem. In fact, I just had to unlock my account again to sign in to post this comment. I haven't been able to find a resolution either, but am looking for one too. I tried contacting support and the person I spoke with only said that this shouldn't be happening and offered no help. I'm at a loss. I'm really hoping something replies with an answer.

I'm not following. I have only ever used a gmail account for my apple id. I never set up a mac.com address, and if that was auto setup, I wouldn't know how to access and never have. Do you think if we changed our email addresses we use for the apple id that this would make the problem go away? Or would it still be an issue because the old email address is still tied to our accounts?