Your iCloud password for [my email address] is incorrect.

I'm running 10.9.5 on my MacBook Air, and recently (days?) I keep getting the following message:


"Your iCloud password for [my email address] is incorrect. Please ensure you are entering the correct password for your iCloud account."


Knowing that my iCloud user ID and password are the same as my Apple ID, I type in my Apple password, but the dialog immediately comes back. If I click Cancel, it sleeps for 20 minutes, then asks (annoys) me again.


Just to be sure that I my password was correct, I successfully logged into icloud.com. Yup, it worked fine there.


Based on other discussion postings, I thought it might be a damaged keychain, so I repaired it (it did need repairing), and restarted, but that didn't solve the problem. I then deleted three related keys, but still no success.


Again, based on other discussion postings, I signed out of my iCloud account (which was scary as my contacts and calendar disappeared) and signed back in successfully, but still the error message appears. Ug!

MacBook Air, OS X Mavericks (10.9.5)

Posted on Oct 10, 2014 12:46 PM

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5 replies

Oct 10, 2014 1:47 PM in response to dominic23

I know my password is correct since it worked logging into www.icloud.com.


I use a lot of third-party applications, but none of them require access to iCloud (that I know of...). I assume that since the dialog that keeps coming up doesn't indicate a specific app, that the problem is system-related, not application-related, but since I haven't figured this out yet, the answer could lie anywhere.


I looked at that support article (good idea), but currently I don't have any app-specific passwords. That said, if an app is triggering the problem (and this deserves some thought), and that app doesn't support two-step verification, maybe that's the problem (big maybe 🙂 ).


Thanks for the ideas!

Oct 11, 2014 9:16 AM in response to Trail Slider

Thinking about what dominic23 wrote, I did two things, and the message has mercifully not come back, so I'm fairly sure the problem went away. Here are the two actions I took, one of which might have been the message killer:


* In System Preferences > iCloud > Manage... > View Account..., I edited my credit card information even though I don't pay for extra iCloud storage, and even though my prior credit card information (the little that I could see) was correct. It's hard to imagine that this helped, but I mention it just in case.


* I went to "My Apple ID" (https://appleid.apple.com/account/home) > "Manage Your Apple ID", and generated an app-specific password (my first one). I then went to System Preferences > iCloud, signed out of my iCloud account, and then signed back in, but this time using my app-specific password, which it accepted without complaint.


I also noticed that since yesterday, Apple changed the content on their support page related to app-specific passwords (Using app-specific passwords). Apple had a sentence that indicated something happened on October 1, 2014, but that sentence was just removed. So I wonder if more than just a support page changed, if perhaps Apple also fixed this problem on their side. Wait, what am I thinking! ;^)


Good luck to anyone else that has this issue!

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Your iCloud password for [my email address] is incorrect.

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