Understanding IMAP/SMTP password's storage in keychain

Question

Understanding IMAP/SMTP password's storage in keychain

iCloud is not used/enabled, nor iCloud Keychain does this here.

My tries to get some understanding of IMAP/SMTP password storage in keychain. For those IMAP/SMTP accounts taken over from previous OS X version installed Sierra seems to have in Local Items keychain a pair: com.apple.account.IMAP.accountsync and com.apple.account.IMAP.password (plus such pair for SMTP). For IMAP/SMTP account created today (Sierra 10.12) one can find in Local Items just ...IMAP.password and ....SMTP.password. Where this difference from? Is .accountsync-type obsolete now?

I can also see that for every Goole mail account only .accountsync entry is present in keychain. But Google accounts have special handling in mac OS not at this point. So maybe presence of only .accountsync for Google mail accounts is in-line of this design.

iMac, macOS Sierra (10.12.6), null

Posted on Dec 10, 2017 10:27 AM

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Answer 1

Dec 10, 2017 11:54 AM in response to Community User

I am quite sure for all IMAP and SMTP accounts other than Google me will remove passwords of .accountsync type from Local Items keychain. I did some testing with sending, receiving e-mails and background synchronizing with IMAP server, all works for one account I already done it. Unfortunately it is not possible to make backup of them as Exporting not available and outsourcing to special private keychain newly created (copy & paste) also results in some error "content of this item cannot be retrieved" on pasting into special backup keychain.

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