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jasnw

macrumors 65816
Original poster
Nov 15, 2013
1,074
1,140
Seattle Area (NOT! Microsoft)
Is there any guidance anywhere, or any third-party tool, that can aid in mucking out the keychain? Both my login and Local Items keychains have many duplicate entries that clutter up trying to figure out what's important. Things like com.apple.assistant, <key>, iMessage Encryption Key, and iMessage Signing Key. These entries have nothing that can tell you how old they are, and none of them expire. I am sure if I just start deleting stuff like this that some wheels will fall off somewhere and my installation of macOS will not recover until I do a down-to-the-metal reinstall (been there).

Any ideas on this? As I've said before in these forums, keychain is my most disliked of the Apple-provided utilities, which is problematic because of its importance (and no, I don't put my keychains out in iCloud).
 
Interested in the OP's problem, too.

A question for anyone reading who "knows the keychain":
In times past, now and then one could just "empty all the caches" and start over.
What would happen if one were to delete ALL the stored keychain entries and "start over"?

Would the Mac still run with all keychain entries "cleared out"?
(even though you'd have to re-enter passwords, etc.)
 
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