Mac Mail Keychain & Snow Leopard

[TeckniX]

I just recently updated to snow leopard, before doing so I never had any problems with the keychain login.

The issue now is that mac mail constantly requests my keychain password in order to:
- check for mail
- save drafts
- send email

My setup is a simple gmail imap setup, this NEVER happened on leopard, it would ask once for my keychain password upon app load then would be properly authorized throughout the session till I quit mail.

Upgrading to Snow Leopard has been great, except for this issue - Not a big fan of deleting the account and re-creating it. Do I just need to delete the login/password saved in the keychain?

Any help would be appreciated!

edit: I removed the password entries in my keychain, quit mail and had the 'new' mail save the password within keychain - Hopefully this will do the trick!

 

[Lifeisabeach]

Try running the Keychain First Aid.
Mac OS X 10.6 Help: Solving problems with keychains

 

[TeckniX]

Try running the Keychain First Aid.
Mac OS X 10.6 Help: Solving problems with keychains

That was actually my first move - Keychain FirstAid comes back saying that everything is great and working well.

The changes I made yesterday had no effect. Any other suggestions?

 

[Lifeisabeach]

Is the the master Keychain password that you are being prompted for every time you run Mail? If so, is it only with Mail, or any app that need access to the Keychain?

 

[TeckniX]

Try running the Keychain First Aid.
Mac OS X 10.6 Help: Solving problems with keychains

This seems to happen for the Mail app only - But it's only the only app that I know of that has sleep/request patterns.

The issue with mail is that even though the setup is IMAP, it checks for emails every 5minutes, which will then prompt me for my keychain password. Once that is entered, then I'm ok for another (unknown) period of
time, or until I decide to send an email.

For example, adium requests my password only once, then works all day. If I disconnect/reconnect then it will ask me for the password.

My keychain is set to auto-lock after 5mins of inactivity. When the Mail.app 'unlocks' the keychain, the actual keychain itself seems to still be locked, so I don't think it has anything to do with it (just trying to provide you with more detail on the setup)

Also my keychain password is independent of my login password.

 

[Lifeisabeach]

This seems to happen for the Mail app only - But it's only the only app that I know of that has sleep/request patterns.

The issue with mail is that even though the setup is IMAP, it checks for emails every 5minutes, which will then prompt me for my keychain password. Once that is entered, then I'm ok for another (unknown) period of
time, or until I decide to send an email.

For example, adium requests my password only once, then works all day. If I disconnect/reconnect then it will ask me for the password.

My keychain is set to auto-lock after 5mins of inactivity. When the Mail.app 'unlocks' the keychain, the actual keychain itself seems to still be locked, so I don't think it has anything to do with it (just trying to provide you with more detail on the setup)

Also my keychain password is independent of my login password.

Alrighty. I'm not terribly keen on managing the Keychain, so I've done a bit of experimenting. I thought it was because your Keychain lockout was set to the same interval as your Mail check. Duplicating that, however, did not do the trick. I've tried a couple other ideas, but I just can't duplicate this.

My best suggestion at the moment is to export your items as a backup, then reset the Keychain completely and start fresh with Mail. If it works normally at this point, then just re-import your backups. If Mail starts acting up again after those imports, then one of them must be the culprit. You'll just have to root it out from there. Hopefully though, you'll just be done with it.

 

[TeckniX]

Thanks lifeisabeach for your continued support - I ended up saying f'it to the auto-lock out and have it always unlocked (unless I have the screen saver or logged back in..)

This seems to have worked quite well. Maybe Snow Leopard has updated some security permissions, preventing an application from getting full access to the keychain.

That's one thing I never understood, is why can't I see a list of 'keychain approved' applications? When it says 'blabla application is requesting access to your keychain' you can select once or always - yet this can never be updated afterwards!
But I disgress