Mail Drops Passwords

I switched from a PC to a Mac several months ago. I vowed I would become familiar with all of the indigenous programs rather than start adding Microsoft programs. So far, I have held to that vow, but Mail is beginning to test my patience.

Mail has a bad habit of not being able to remember the passwords for the two Comcast accounts I use. Every so often I get a drop down asking for the password and once I provide it, I get a mail dump of everything that has been stacking up in the meantime.

Is this a common characteristic of Mail?

In addition, the lack of formatting capability makes me yearn for Outlook occasionally, but I am resisting the temptation to revert.

Rick

What version of OS X do you have? My Mail.app has been doing the same and it began with an update a few months back. Darn annoying since it'll work for a while and then randomly ask for the password that it already seems to know..

What's even more annoying is that I use application-specific passwords for GMail, so when I get the dropdown for GMail. I have no way of entering the password short of creating a new one and entering it..

I have tried deleting some of the .plist files associated with Mail.app to see if it would resolve the problem and it hasn't. I think I went into the Keychain and played around there without much luck..

So this is not a common characteristic of Mail.app, but something it seems to have developed of late, at least for me..

Same for me too. I only have the one account and it's been happening on and off since I went to Lion and then Mountain Lion. It's like an annoying pop-up that you can't get rid of at times.

My OS is 10.8.2.

Rick

OK, same as mine. I hadn't been using Mail for a long time, so not sure if this problem was there in Lion, but pendlewitch seems to have it since then..so perhaps it's been around for a while..

Though, after this happened, I stopped using Mail..might try Thunderbird or some other third party app to see how it works..

I have multiple mail accounts that I use. I have never had a problem with gmail or my own domain mail, but I have the same password issue with yahoo, hotmail, and outlook.com. I find that by hitting Cancel, in a few minutes mail.app will retry and I have no further problems. My Mini came with Lion and I have had this issue since my machine was new. I did a clean install with Mountain Lion, same thing, all the way through the upgrade process to 10.8.2 also. Basically, I just tolerate it now.

Bill

Hmm,

I remember a while back that I had frequent drop-outs and eventually cured it with some sage advice on here by extending the time interval between checks that the Mail app made on the server for new mail. I extended from 1 minute to 15 mins and have had a lot less drop outs since.

I read some research and people seem to think that it might be the server -side pop-account allowing access only every so often itself. Mail doesn't understand or receive the proper error message and comes back asking for a password.