You can make a difference in the Apple Support Community!

When you sign up with your Apple Account, you can provide valuable feedback to other community members by upvoting helpful replies and User Tips.

Looks like no one’s replied in a while. To start the conversation again, simply ask a new question.

jgoff87 Author

Level 1

8 points

Is Anyone Else Having Yahoo! IMAP Server Reject Their Password?

A couple of weeks ago my Mac Mail started returning the following message in a pop-up box every time it went online to the server to get my email:

The Yahoo! IMAP server “imap.mail.yahoo.com” rejected the password for user “xxxxxxx@att.net”

My email has worked flawlessly for over a year since I purchased my Macbook Pro, and it has only been recently that there has been any issues. A Bing or Google search quickly revealed I am not alone in having this problem. Several people offered solutions, but all seemed to admit their problem returned after an hour or two. I am able to retrieve my email eventually, if I re-input my password as many as 7 or 8 times in the pop-up box, but the same thing happens again in 5 minutes when it tries to sync with the online account again.

Today I spent considerable time with AT&T Tech Support and the only thing we were able to determine was that since my email messages were on the server and I was able to read, forward, send, and receive from the online account, the trouble was not with AT&T mail. There were a couple of discrepencies, however. AT&T says they only support POP3 but my Mac Mail is connecting through IMAP and there is no way that I can find to change it to POP3. I'm not sure what that difference is. Also, AT&T wants to use port 995 for the email but Mac Mail is using port 993. That can be changed and has been changed, but although it stopped the pop-up window from appearing, my email is never synced with the online account with port 995.

AT&T Support routed me to an online help page to verify my settings, but as I answered their questions regarding my current OS, version, email client, etc. I ran into a snag: the support only goes up to Mac Mail v4.x and I'm running v5.2. It made me wonder if one of the Apple updates I performed recently upgraded my Mac Mail and that there is now some kind of a conflict, yet unresolved.

I have not contacted Apple support yet, but that is my next step. To me the problem is either with the Mac Mail App or the Yahoo! IMAP. Perhaps it is simply a matter of timing, where Yahoo! IMAP is looking for the password when Mac Mail isn't sending it or visa versa. I have to believe that others in the Apple community must be experiencing something similar to myself and I was wondering if there is anyone that has solved this problem. I have extensive PC experience but I am relatively new to the Mac world. Perhaps I am overlooking something very simple. Thanks in advance if anyone has any suggestions.

MacBook Pro, Mac OS X (10.7.4)

Posted on Jul 14, 2012 12:25 PM

Top-ranking reply

Glenn Leblanc

Level 6

12,527 points

Posted on Jul 14, 2012 12:31 PM

There is a problem with some accounts using the ATT/Yahoo servers. The problem is more likely with Yahoo. Many people are having these problems. I suspect Yahoo servers are just overloaded. Mine has cleared up for the most part, but still having occasional problems.

Best I can tell you is to use the webmail when it's bad. You can also forward the email from the website to another email address.

View in context

20 replies

jgoff87 Author

Level 1

8 points

Jul 24, 2012 9:48 PM in response to DMEaton

To DMEaton,

I think this may have solved my problem, too. Shortly after posting my issue here and not seeing any definitive solution, I installed Mozilla Thunderbird and have not had any trouble with it. But, as you correctly pointed out, it is also a POP email client. When working with AT&T tech support, they stressed that they do not support IMAP, but POP only. However, they could not figure a way around the default IMAP (and neither could I). I think your solution has fixed the trouble. At least it is working so far. If not, back to Thunderbird. I'm having similar issues with iCal and it is mumbling something about "The server responded with '504' to operation CalDAVAccountRefreshQueueableOperation." This may be related to my email woes, although I couldn't see any reference to IMAP or POP in iCal. Thank you very, very much, however!!!! Hopefully the email trouble can be put to rest. 🙂

Jul 26, 2012 9:58 AM in response to DMEaton

DMEaton,

I applied your solution this morning to the same problem that was plaguing me as well. So far, it has worked perfectly. Thank you for the answer to an extremely annoying issue.

jgoff87 Author

Level 1

8 points

Jul 28, 2012 5:36 PM in response to jgoff87

Well, by either coincidence or design, when I upgraded to Mountain Lion from Lion the problem returned. I had to disable my Mac Mail and start using Mozilla Thunderbird again. Not exactly my first choice but I can't tolerate the constant nagging for my password. Thanks anyway, guys! 😕

artbaysf

Level 1

0 points

Sep 30, 2012 6:39 PM in response to jgoff87

For the past 4 months I have been having growing problems with mac mail (osx 10.6.8) and att my dsl service provider and a yahoo email address. I was constantly being asked to reenter my password, I was often not able to send mail withouth quitting mail and restarting and sometimes have to do that a few times. Then about a month ago I started getting a fair percentage of my emails timed out. As far as I can tell (because there is absolutely no real support from att - Not sure if everyone know this but att used yahoo as their mail backbone. However it is virutually impossible to get through to yahoo tech support without first going through the lowlevel att support, and in the end you get nowhere. SOOOOO after going through many boards and pretty much ready to give up my email address of 10 years I think I may have found a solution. Personally I think there are several layers of problems. For whatever reason mac mail does not get along well with yahoo servers, also many ISP's are now permanently blocking emails from yahoo accounts because of the large amount of spam. They are using something called spamcop and they have yahoo on their blacklist.

What I eneded up doing was getting a paid service (about 30 bucks a year) to serve as my outgoing mail server. It's called authsmpt. I installed it about 3 days ago and since then my mac mail has been working just fine. No asking me to reenter password, no rejected emails, no failures trying to send emails. So for the moment things are OK. I'll see how this is going in the next week or two or more, but this is the first trouble free emails days I have had in the last 4 or 5 months. That alone has been worth the price of admission. Ultimately I do beleive the problem lies in yahoo servers, and they know their is a problem but they don't want to address it because of their money problems and they don't see this as a big revenue resource. Those of us who joined Yahoo many years ago are kind of stuck with a failing business. They don't just want to boot us because they need the numbers for the company valuation, but at least when it comes to their email, they won't be putting any money into this any time soon.

Hope this helps someone else out there, because it was literally driving me nuts.

boouch

Level 1

0 points

Mar 31, 2013 6:34 PM in response to jgoff87

my yahoo does it on 3 different macbooks and now my iphone 5

only yahoo accounts though

Is Anyone Else Having Yahoo! IMAP Server Reject Their Password?