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October 9, 2006

internet

Password prompts from .Mac account in Mail.app?

Posted Oct. 9, ’06, 2:49 PM PT by Scott Silverman
Category | Internet

.Mac statusI have been plagued with a problem since about as long as I can remember. My .Mac email account will continuously prompt me for a password in Mail.app. No matter how many times I enter the password and click OK, the password box continues to pop up.

Earlier today I was on the .Mac website to check if the mail servers were down, which I thought might be the problem. The servers were not down, but I did see a notification just below the server status which said:

Some may be experiencing difficulty with mail. Please click here for more information.

Upon clicking “there” I was greeted by an exact description of my problem, along with two purported “solutions” and a message that the .Mac team was working on resolving the issue. While the solutions did not work for me, and Mail.app still prompts me for a password a few times a day, it’s good to know the problem is being worked on. The .Mac service is too expensive to be having simple issues like this—I hope Apple gets its act together soon.


7 Comments

martie said:

same here! for some mysterious reasons, on odd dated days, when the relative moon humidity is zero, i too experience an eternally continues barrage of password prompts.

October 9, 2006 3:31 PM
Collin Allen said:

I've been having this problem for the last few days (on and off), too. I didn't change anything significant on my system, so I'm sure it's a problem on Apple's end. Hopefully they'll get it sorted out soon.

October 9, 2006 4:31 PM
shadownight said:

Hey guys, I had this problem, but not with .Mac mail, and it was in fact a keychain problem. Fix:
Open Keychain Access (in the Utilities folder) and select "Keychain First Aid" from the Keychain Access menu. Verify and Repair your keychain if necessary. This did the trick for me, hope it does for you too!

October 9, 2006 4:56 PM
eVolution said:

Same here also. I've had this problem forever (i.e. years!) with my .mac email addresses using MAIL, but very randomly, sometimes a few times a day sometimes OK for weeks at a time.
I have always intuitively used the "Workaround" offered now by Apple, but this has been so frustrating!
I always thought this was a problem with the Mail app displaying this message as a result of the internet connection being somehow unreliable so the mail server did not acknowledge the password or something like that.

Thanks so much for pointing that Apple has recognized the problem; I just hope they will actually fix it, and if they do, it will take a while to be sure the issue os gone since it is occurring so randomly.

October 9, 2006 6:13 PM
canonprh said:

Have had the same problem for a long time, but not just for .Mac accounts. I thought the problem was Mail since it has so many other irregularities. Thanks to this article I was made aware of the online status workaround. For now, I am getting normal functioning once again.

October 9, 2006 10:14 PM
Brent Mullins said:

Reassuring to know there isn't something odd operating on my computer alone--I've been having the same thing go on for quite a while. I also have problems with Mail whirling away to try and get mail, without having the keychain verification pop up.

My theory is that ever since they announced the New Improved! changes coming to .Mac, this has been happening. Since they haven't announced when--much less exactly what--they're going to be doing, I have no idea if their software changes would have this possible impact.

My usual workaround is to go the .mac on the web, although that is a lot worse than dealing with it via Mail--it's better than not getting it at all.

Often Force Quit is the only way to have it reorder itself and integrate the new mail etc.

They lie ALL the time about how often .mac is down--and for how long, and how many. And no matter how many times you send in a complaint, you don't get any real answers--and certainly not on a timely basis.

.Mac--and it's integration with Mail--is one of the worst products of Apple, and if I hadn't already invested in the email address, would be LONG gone.

October 10, 2006 1:40 AM
spiderbat said:

Some problem here. I've been using Eudora since last July, when the system manager at work forced us to use a form of SMTP authentication that Eudora seems not able to perform. The obnoxious password requests started a couple of weeks ago and I'd guess they are related to some change on Apple's side.
Another inconvenience I'm experiencing is the fact that my default mail reader app keeps to be reset to "Eudora" every few days, but I'm not sure that "Mail" or Apple are to be blamed for this. Anyway, my first wish about "Mail" would be the fixing of the AppleScript implementation bug that hampers the creation and manipulation of new/reply messages by scripts.

October 10, 2006 7:37 AM

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