Yahoo IMAP server - Rejected Password

My first post so I hope this goes through. I had the same problem for two days and everything written here is on point. I've been working on my wife's iMac and it keeps asking for the password. Email is fine on the iPhone and the iPad. AT&T help desk was useless. My resolution was to delete the Yahoo account on the iMac and rebuild it. In the process of rebuilding it you must put in a bogus email address to get the POP option to appear. After the rebuild the incoming side of email was fine but outgoing gave a spinning disk. Eventually I unchecked the 'use default ports' on the outgoing side and forced it to port 465. Now everything is working fine. Hope this helps.

Marc,

How long ago did you fix it?

Does the iPad and iPhone automatically fetch data?

Did you create a new IMAP account or did you "rebuild it" i.e. rebuild the old account?

Please explain step by step: "you must put in a bogus email address to get the POP option to appear."

GG

I think Apple has a problem in that it keeps defaulting to IMAP when a new mail account is set up. Having to enter a bogus email to get the POP option seems like a OS X problem to me.

Spacecruiser

George, the problem started last night and I fixed it this morning. So far it is holding up (6:00 pm here). The only problem I seem to have is my wife keeps a large list of 'sent' messages as a history and they are not there. They do appear on the web side so I'm just trying to figure out how to get them back on the iMac. Anyway, back to the problem.

Yes, both the iPad and the iPhone fetch data. Mail and calendars are synchronized though iCloud. Both mobile devices have been working fine, it was just the iMac that stopped working.

The bogus email wasn't my idea - I read it on someone else's post. When you go to Mail/Preferences/Accounts and hit the minus sign - you delete the account. Then you hit the plus sign to build it again. The first screen you see has the email filled in and wants a password to get into the account. I added the right password but kept getting the message 'won't login to Yahoo IMAP server'. Now I don't want to be in IMAP - my server is the POP server. But it kept forcing me into the imap.mail.yahoo.com server. There was no way to change it. But someone noticed that if you put in an invalid email address it would bring up another screen that would allow you to change the imap to pop. That's what I meant by bogus.

Marc,

I believe this thread is focused on the Yahoo IMAP server. POP does seem to work well with Yahoo. IMAP does not. That's the problem: you can't synchronize the account among desktop (using Mail) and portable devices unless you are on IMAP. It may be time to change my website host.

GG

The problem is a Yahoo problem.

I have been running flawlessly for the past 2 months with yahoo mail. I have my iMac with Mail.app and PC 7 with Windows mail set up using pop/SMTP and the iPad using IMAP. In all cases I have fetch turned off. I am not married to my mail and I get mail when I want and I do not want to be disturbed by alarms that a mail has arrived. As it has been noted the problem arises when many devices access the same account at the same time.

It appears Yahoo is having a hard time staying current with all the new devices available today as is indicated by the email I received today pasted below.

Below is the email from Yahoo

Thank you for using Yahoo! Contacts. We know how critical your contacts are to you and we want to inform you of an upcoming change in our Yahoo! Contacts mobile sync services. This change will affect users who have imported or plan to import contacts from Facebook into Yahoo! Contacts and then sync them to their smartphone or tablet.

After August 3, 2012, when syncing your Yahoo! Contacts with a smartphone or tablet, your Facebook contacts will no longer sync to that device. Facebook contacts synced with a smartphone or tablet via Yahoo! Contacts prior to August 3, 2012 will no longer be accessible on that smart device.

Please note that all of your contacts - including your Facebook contacts - will remain intact and fully accessible through Yahoo! Contacts. You can also access your Yahoo! Contacts when you sign in to your Yahoo! Mail.

Kind regards,

! Contacts team

Papalegba has diagnosed the probalem correctly see his post on July 22nd for the proper port settings.

George, the problem reappeared yesterday. So I packed up the iMac, drove it to the Apple store and my genius switched me over to Yahoo iMap. As you might expect everything worked perfectly at the store. Got home last night and we were fine. This morning - the error message came back. Based on an earlier post to this thread, I logged my wife off Yahoo mail through the web browser and re-logged her on again through the browser. Everything seems to be working perfectly again. I should add my wife uses mail synchronized on an iMac, iPhone and iPad through iCloud. The logging on and off using a browser may be the work-around for the time being.

Marc

As George explained IMAP does not work properly on the iMac OSX Mail.app.

I think you will continue to have the password problems as long as you use IMAP on the iMac Mail.app with Yahoo Mail. I would use POP on the iMac mail.app and set the mail to "Leave a copy on the server " that way you won't interfere with the IMAP capabilities of the iPhone or iPad. You will still have the same functionality on the mobile devices with iOS.

I should have said:

Marc

As George explained IMAP does not work properly on the iMac OSX Mail.app with YAHOO MAIL because Yahoo I believe is the culprit.

I may have found a solution that I haven't seen suggested yet. Here's our background so that you can decide if your mileage may vary:

* We're running OS X 10.8 "Mountain Lion", but the password rejection problem started with OS X 10.7 "Lion".

* I can't say for sure when it started, but it feels like at least 3-4 weeks now.

* We have no password rejection problems with Yahoo! mail on three other devices (two iPhones and an iPad).

* We are longtime users of Yahoo! e-mail as part of our AT&T DSL service which we started waaaaay back when it was Pacific Bell DSL. So well over ten years now.

* So we have both "@yahoo.com" and "@pacbell.net" e-mail addresses, but all of them work with Yahoo!'s mail servers for client-based, web-based, and iDevice e-mail.

* We currently have Mail set up with three accounts on our MacBook Pro: two "@yahoo.com" accounts and one "@pacbell.net" account. Only one of the "@yahoo.com" accounts is having this problem.

* I realized today that what's "special" about the account that's having the problem is that it's the "main" account directly linked/associated with our AT&T DSL account.

MY SOLUTION: For the affected account, I changed the user name from "_____@yahoo.com" to the primary AT&T DSL user name without an @suffix of any kind. This is the AT&T DSL (formerly Pacific Bell DSL) user name that I originally (a long, long, long time ago) tethered to Yahoo!. It's hard to remember/describe exactly which user name this is, but it may help to say that this is also the same user name I can use without any "@suffix" to log into Yahoo! web mail.

I have quit and restarted Mail about five times now and haven't been prompted for a password. Time will tell if it's a permanent solution.

Posted too soon. I was just prompted for a password. Still, not being asked for a password every time I launch Mail is a slight improvement.

I also forgot to mention, that I always click [Cancel] when prompted for the password and everything still works after that. Sometimes it will take the account offline, but then I just bring it back online and everything is fine. I have not been re-entering my password at all.

So if you're actually re-typing your password every time, there's no need. Just hit cancel. (The password prompts are much less annoying in Mountain Lion, by the way; they're not a separate window.)

The whole Yahoo rejecting the password issue, is really frustaring and pain. Everything started because Yahoo had the great idea of changing the settings of thir mail server in such way that no two devices can be conected to the same email server. I have only one @yahoo.com account that is not affected for the password rejection issues, because it is only accessed through my iphone or yahoo.com.

My other two @att.net email accounts do have the password rejecting issue. AT&T and Yahoo where no help when I called them, so my soution was; a) created a gmail account. b) forwarded the emails from the @att.net account to the gmail account I created. That way I can still receive the emails sent to the @att.net, and better yet, when you repply the emails forwared to the gmail from mac mail, the out going mail will be delivered through the @att.net.

That the only way I was able to get rid of the password rejected issue without having to completele change email address.

Hope this help.

Regards

Steve

If only one of your Yahoo accounts is having a problem with passwords could it be that the account with the problem is set up on your Macbook as an IMAP account and the ones that work without password problems are set up as POP accounts on the Macbook? You can find that information in Mail Preferences/Accounts.

THE SOLUTION...

...at least for me.

After countless hours and days and weeks of doing everything listed above, somebody here had the solution and posted it previouslyt but apparently it went unred. Since I implemented what follows, I have had to re-emter the yahoo password maybe twice in two months.

The problem seems to be universal to those that have a Mac and also and iDevice. Follow me, please. You go to your Mac. Try accessing your email. It is a No-Go. It requests your password a thousand times, to no avail. You launch Safari and access your Yahoo webmail successfuly. Then you go back to the Mac's Mail program and out of the blue, you can access Yahoo again. Then you leave home, access your Yahoo email via your lovely iDevice, which is probably set to either fetch or pull your mail from your different mail servers. All is cool. you go home and Mail is gone amnesic one more time. Right? This sequence happened to me daily for months.

How do you fix it? Go to all of your iDevices from which you access Yahoo mail via the mail program. Go under "Settings". Select "Mail, Contacts, Calendars". Select "Fetch New Data". Scroll down and select "Advanced". Select your Yahoo account. A new page will open. Select "Manual". Go to the iOS Mail program. Get your mail from the Yahoo account. Do this on all your iDevices. Now, go to the best computer ever created (Mac). Launch the mail program. Get your mail from your Yahoo account. You may have to do one more cycle of frustration entering the password back into the amnesic Mail or even going into Safari and accessing Yahoo webmail. After this lethany of uncessary, your Mail program should be back to a state of bliss and not forget the Yahoo password.

Once again, for me this was the final solution to the problem.