Yahoo mail rejects password but only on iMac

Hi, I have got an appointment at the apple store tomorrow, cause the person I spoke to at apple care said that it's a software issue and they would sort it at the store. Fingers crossed.

Hi,

Today took my iMac to the apple store in Exeter, we discovered that the main user key chain was sort of tripping over its self with saved passwords. What the iMac tech did was to delete the key chain and reinstall it, that was after we deleted my bt yahoo account and reinstalled it, I told him I had already done that a couple of times. Anyway after the key chain was reinstalled the mail asked for the password to be saved in the chain but then my mails started coming in, hey pesto a result, we logged out & in a couple of times still good. Once home and set up, all was well for 15 mins or so then back to asking for my password, a complete waste of 3 hrs.

I have sort of admitted defeat and am now in the process of changing my yahoo account contacts, iTunes, ICloud etc. to a gmail account bit of a pain but I suppose I can get rid of all those rubbish emails I get.

Good luck with the quest if I do get any news I will let you know, likewise please.

Cheers Lee.

SNAP - Been working fine since October 2011 - March 2012, your IMAP Yahoo password has been rejected? I went to Yahoo Browser and saved options (without changing them), and it worked for a while. Spoke to BT who said IMAP is having difficulty remembering password and as it isn't a BT problem will cost me £30!!! I phoned Apple but as I am out of cover they wanted £35 - If anyone can find a solution this would be fantastic.

Thank you - yes it worked (for now). Lets hope Apple sort this problem out soon!

Same drill for me. Mac e-mail worked for years. As of about a week ago, it suddenly requires me to enter my password which it will not subsequently accept.

Log on to yahoo mail account and suddenly every thing works.

I dimly recall clicking "yes" to one of the innumerable software updates a couple of weeks ago when this mess started, but who knows.

I phone works fine.

Lucky you Chris ;-). No, unfortunately not for me!!

It is much better, but still get the message a few times a week

On a different note, my Yahoo mail was hacked y'day!!

So I really did need to change my password, maybe this will resolve the problem once ands for all.

How do I check I don't have a Trojan on my Mac?

I deleted and set it up..worked for a bit but the problem came back shortly thereafter.

This must be a Yahoo thing!! I have 7 other email boxes and the only problem I have is with authenticating to Yahoo!

There are various reports of the Password being reported by Mail as rejected by the Yahoo mail server.

The common frustration is that the set-up worked fine for months if not years and then started repeatedly prompting for the password.

I have been wrestling with this issue for some time as my Yahoo account dates back to 2006 and contains many grand-fathered features that are tricky to unravel (like disposable account alias's).

I have attempted various remedies proposed in this thread mostly around removing the Mail account keychain entries and/or deleting the mail account and adding it as a new account (and variations on the theme.

I have also forced a rebuild of the Mail preferences file. The file is "com.apple.Mail.plist" found in the /username/Library/Preferences/ directory. In Mail note all your setting details on all your accounts in account preferences, Quit Mail, remove (or rename) the file, start mail, add your accounts back in with the same names. As the other files in Mail are still there, the folders etc will be there.

(In Lion the user library is likely to be hidden, you access it by holding the Option key and then selecting Library from the Finder's Go menu.)

After all this - still I get the error. So I switched to an alternate Mail software engine and the Yahoo account I have problems with works like a dream.

My conclusion is that there is a Bug in Mail related to the Keychain that is most commonly seen with Yahoo accounts.

My recommendation if you are experiencing the Password being reported by Mail as rejected by the Yahoo mail server is to either:

- migrate your mail account to an alternate provider (i.e. gmail)

- use alternate email software on your Mac (i.e. Thunderbird)

Hope this helps.....

I have a solution that has lasted a couple of days for me so far. I hope I am not judging the success too soon!

I have just changed my yahoo password to contain only lower case and numbers. I haven't had another failure since!

The reason I tried this is because I only started getting the problem when I changed my password a week ago. That new password had upper and lower case letters as well as numbers and the problem started to occur the following day. My previous password had had only lower case letters and numbers. Nothing else I did had any effect and I observed all the same symptoms that others reported on the many support threads (e.g. it works while I am logged-in to the yahoo email site through a browser.).

I'll be interested to know if this helps anyone else.

YES! This has fixed the issue for me too! I recently reset my password and changed it which meant mac Mail kept rejecting my password. After reading your message I got rid of the capital letters in my password and everything works again!

My mac mail had worked perfectly for couple of years at least and the only thing that changed between it working and not working was my password. It must have had no caps in it the first time round also.

I am no expert but it seems like there's something wrong with the encryption between mac Mail and the BT servers, something that screws up when theres a capital letter involved.

THANK YOU, such a good find!

Sorry to be a bit of a wet blanket, but I tried this(-ish; I'll explain) a while ago, and had little to no luck.

I changed my password so it had all lowercase letters, and numbers in two locations in the password (like snow55ball66). I am being driven crazy with constant password requests from Mac Mail for this account. I am just now trying a single-number location (like snow55ball). I will post in a few days/weeks as to how well the change is working.

I have two Yahoo email accounts, one a plus account and the other just a standard account. Both are at least 10 years old. Over the past year or so, the Plus account has become a password-request nightmare. The free account has now also joined in on these demands.

I have the Plus account accessing the IMAP Yahoo servers, and the free account accessing the POP servers. Both accounts are being accessed on a variety of devices (iPhone, two iPads, Mail application on my Mac). I have all three iOS devices set to manually fetch the Yahoo accounts so there is not a constant demand on the servers. The only relief I get is when I log in to either account via the webmail interface in a browser, but that is only good for a few hours or so. I never have password problems on the iPads, and have started to experience password issues for the smtp server for the Plus account on my iPhone. For comparison purposes, I also have an icloud account accessed by all of the same devices, and I have never had a problem like this with it.

Anyway, I have just now changed the passwords of both accounts to be lowercase+one number string, with no caps or punctuation (I wanted to even test all lowercase only, but Yahoo will not allow that low level of password security anymore). Like I said, I'll report back. Those of you who have made successful changes: Could you describe where and how you have used numbers in your passwords? For example, snowball66 vs 66snowball vs 66snowball67, or snow55ball (my apologies for you "snowball" password users who are now scrambling to change your passwords!).

Well, that didn't take long! Things were fine Mac Mail-wise for a few hours, but as soon as I updated my iPhone account, the password issue came back on the Mac.