Mail still forgets passwords

This whole chain is depressing. I have the same issue, and it is especially bad (every password forgotten) after a reboot. I really hoped that I would find the answer here, and obviously no one has the answer. Very depressing.

Leslie

If you lose all your passwords it might mean whole keychain file and maybe other files got corrupt during reboot. I guess you should check your hard drive and make sure its working properly. Also must check keychain for problems.

Mine certainly is not related to the keychain. Somedays it works fine all day and then out of nowhere, it forgets all passwords on two familys of email accounts. Then, sometimes it will not accept the correct password until I reboot. It may work for hours or days or not at all. I think it is related to my iPhone and iPad checking the email accounts and not turning them loose.

The loss of passwords can sometimes be caused by the SMTP and its port selection as the Outgoing server. Specifically, if the default set of three ports selection is used, it can be useful when moving from venue to venue, but if it needs to basically use only one of the ports (25, 587, or 465) and there is a temporary hiccup with that port, then toggling by Mail to try one of the orher ports can lead to failure, which leads to the loss of the account's password.

Since you are having this frequent problem, determine the exact Port that your provider recommends, and then use Custom Port to enter that. For example, if Port 587 would be recommended, put that in the Custom Port entry and lock it in.

Ernie

Thats true, I haven't had this problem since I sold my iPod Touch. Now I just have my Macbook checking my mail accounts. It was always the iCloud account.

I have the same general issue being described here. If anything, the frequency has increased since moving to Lion, but it's been around for a lot longer than that.

My pet theory is that is the problem lies with the ISP providing your email SMTP connection, in that when Mail.app polls for new messages if it times out connecting it will take the entire mailbox offline, instead of retrying. It doesn't actually forget the password, it just decides that it's not valid anymore, and won't retry with it.

Completely exiting out of Mail and restarting will help it "remember" the forgotten password, and then you have to take the accounts back online.

It would be nice if Mail would just retry the connection a few times before giving up on it and deciding your account details are incorrect. So, in that sense, Apple could address it from an ease of use standpoint, even if the real issue is connectivity to your email provider.

Mail Build 5.2 1278

Just got really subborn with my own imap, icloud and Gmail accounts. Just thud, all of a sudden ... it refuses to work because of password errors over three different networks.

I opened Network Utility and noticed a (one) dropped packet. Opened iChat, and the the network soon showed 100% packet traffic.

I quit Mail and restarted. On program reboot, everything came up like nothing had happened.

I summized one drop packet in the initial sweep sends Mail into subborn mode.

So I say to this topic; check for dropped packets and if you see some, quit until you have no packet loss, then restart the program - it worked for me.

Btw, I seemed to have found a way to resolve the problem here. It's been several weeks now so far without another password error.

In might not be the same issue everyone is having, but in my case changing the "Check for new Messages" interval in Preferences->General to a longer value seems to have made it go away.

I had it set to poll every minute previously, now it's at 15 minutes. I believe my ISP might have been limiting the number of connections per user account somehow to reduce load on their end.

It's a little less real-time now, but I'm not in dire need of receiving more email anyway, so it seems to work out okay.

It would still be nice for Mail.app to handle this better, instead of just forgetting your existing password anytime a connection fails until you restart it.

Interesting! I am new to Apple. I have had my MacBook Pro since the end of January. Around May/June I started experiencing issues with my Mail client requesting the password. Seriously, although I am a very proficient user in the Windows arena, I still feel a bit lost with the Apple OS X 10.7.5 that I am running now. I never experienced this in the Windows platform. Once an account was set up in the mail client, it would simply work. I tried re-entering the password but that wouldn't work. I only have my yahoo mail account. I don't own any other Apple products so it isn't an issue of them tripping over one another. Of course, like others here, I merely had to restart or reboot or wait another day and it would work just fine. I just now deleted the account from Mail. I guess I'll just access my mail via the browser.

This issue has plagued OSX since 10.0. You either randomly get the lightning bolt (reconnect, which promptly fails) or it loses passwords. The fix is to re-launch mail for the lightning bolt problem, and to re-enter your password for the password problem. Other random glitches can be fixed by closing and re-opening mail.

Apple really ought to fix this issue.

Password problem is back in OS X 10.7.5 for me. Just started again for me today.

The only I have been able to get pass the issue is to delete the _account_ then set up the account.

I am on imap, so this may not help people on pop3

Somehow I left off part of my post. My question was about a possible connection with the release of the Mavericks Mail update. The problem is gone today.

This bug still exists in 10.9.

Bug lifetime: 3 years

The fact that this issue has remained for so long is rather pathetic. So much for "it just works."

I suppose having to re-enter passwords for e-mail accounts ranks relatively low in the order of importance, but what Apple is failing to understand is that when using Gmail's two-step verficiation and app-specfic passwords, you have to log in, revoke prior credentials, and generate new ones again. The whole point of app-specific passwords is that it is discarded from plain view after entering it into the app, so this is the only option for "re-entering" a password.

At some point, you just have to throw your hands up and say "I give up" because Apple isn't going to do anything about it. Doing a quick search for troubleshooting led me to this post, and it's quite clear that Apple doesn't care about Mail or want people to use it - the message is loud and clear: I'll just use the web interface from now on.