Big Sur / iMessages Issue

[jwarne1]

There has been a lot of discussion about the issue with iMessages not receiving or sending text messages from a macOS machine. There have been a lot of discussions about how to fix it. It took a long time, but I figured out what causes it. The issue arises when the keychain on your local macOS device is different than the copy of the keychain stored on iCloud. For whatever reason, when the two versions of the keychain do not match, Big Sur will not merge them to make them match. Instead, for whatever other unknown reason, it prevents iMessages from sending or receiving text messages.

Through a long process -- basically deleting keychain items -- I kind of got it to work. I am having a new issue now.

The com.apple.iCloudHelper process, share daemon, and several others are constantly asking me to physically enter may keychain password. I wanted to try to remove iCloud from macOS completely and then re-add it to see if that fixes things. When I try to remove iCloud Drive and Photos, it says that iCloud will be removed when it's "finished updating." It has a progress bar but the progress bar (and bytes uploaded) do not change. I have seen posts about this issue, but never understood the responses. I do not want to click to go ahead and sign out, knowing it could result in lost contacts, messages, and passwords.

Thoughts?

 

[bonebrain]

Best to have a time machine backup of those things you want to make sure you keep. You can then restore later if the iCloud messes things up. Totally trusting the cloud can be a bit scary.

Do you have a list of those key(s) that you deleted to get iMessage working again?