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Mail wont keep passwords?

illegalprelude

illegalprelude

macrumors 68000
Original poster
Mar 10, 2005
1,583
121
Los Angeles, California
Hey you guys, So ive been running into an odd problem with Mail that my iPhone wont do.

I have my .Mac mail and no problem but I also have 4 yahoo emails hooked up. Now, these are paid membership programs so Mail is able to actually hookup to them and receive and send and so forth.

These hooked up to the iPhone, no problem what so ever but mail just keep cycling through them and prompting me that the password is needed for them. I type it in and click to remember, just for it to ask me again. This will go on 20 times and the only way out is to push cancel. Once you do that, you get the little "~" next to the broken mailbox. If you click on it, it then magically no longer gives you that error and works like it should. Just to prompt you in 5 minutes for the email. This also dosent happen everyday but more often then not, it does.

I have also OS X 10.5.2. So any remedies? Again, iPhone wont do it and when mail does work, it works 100% but it just wont remember my damn password lol.
 
This is interesting - I have the same trouble on an account I have with mail.com, although after I enter it once that seems to fix it. When it happens appears to be completely random.

What fascinates me is that I had this problem also on my old Windows box too, which makes me think it's something to do with authentication at the server end.

Mail.com tried porting everything over to a different server, which made the problem not happen as much, but it's still there.

I'm hoping when me.com is released I can set up an auto-forward to it from my mail.com account which will solve the issue.
 
This is a problem I have had intermittently for years with Panther, Tiger and Leopard and I once read an explanation of why it occurs.

But I can't remember it now!

Sorry...
 
But I remember that one fix was to delete the problem account (after archiving the mail) then re-creating it.

It would work fine then.


Idon't bother these days.

The problem seems to right itself the next day.
 
This is what Apple says about the problem:

Mac OS X Mail: "The server rejected the password" alert, even with correct password
Last Modified on: June 29, 2004
Article: 25787
Mail might tell you this, even when you're using the correct password:

"The server {server name} rejected the password for user {username}. Please re-enter your password, or cancel."

This message may appear several times while trying a correct password.

This can happen if the mail server is not available for authentication or cannot be contacted. Click Cancel, then wait a few minutes. After waiting, choose Go Online from the Mailbox menu, then enter the same password.

If this doesn't help, you may indeed be using the wrong password, or it may have been changed. Check with your Internet service provider about how you can reset it, if necessary.

But read here also:

http://discussions.apple.com/message.jspa?messageID=5722239

Seems the trick is to take the accounts off line then back online.
 
I should have said previously, what also helped was reducing the frequency with which Mail pinged my server. But I think if the server isn't playing ball, no matter when Mail checks it, you get the same error. Obviously the more you check it, the greater the odds are of it returning an error.
 
This is so frustrating as I've got the exact same problem with a couple of POP accounts. There's a fix for some people which is to delete the keychain entries for the email accounts then restart mail. But this only fixed the problem for a day or so.

Very strange that something so fundamentally essential is still broken despite all the updates we've had.
 
Do you guys happen to have your accounts setup to POP automatically and from multiple locations?

I work for a public university and a few of our users have experienced the same issue. According to one of our systems engineers, 99.9% of the time this occurs because the user already has a POP session active that for some reason hasn't timed out yet. Attempting to check mail while your account is in this state will just result in the server rejecting the connection (as if your password was incorrect). Consequently, the password won't get saved by the keychain because Mail.app thinks its incorrect. Continually trying to hit the server seems to aggravate this.

Have you guys checked with your ISP and asked that they check the server logs to see what actual error the server is returning?
 
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