Mac Mail- Trouble Getting It To Recognize New Password

Hi All!
I use Mac Mail in my MacBook Pro using OS X 10.11.6. We have several mail accounts on the mac. Some of them are with Yahoo through sbcglobal.net. I received an e-mail telling me that the sbcglobal accounts have been hacked and to change my passwords. I changed my passwords and can log into & out of those accounts at their site via the web with no problems.

But, for each account, Mac Mail pops up a box asking for the password. I'll type it and then the box will tell me that it is unable to verify the account. I tried putting the new passwords into Mail -Preferences with no luck. Connection Doctor only repeated that they can't verify the password.

I tried contacting Yahoo for help, but all I get is a giant circle taking me from "Contact Us" to "E-Mail Us" to "Call Us" to "Chat With Us Now" and back to "Contact Us". As always, they are unreachable. (Sadly, the bad guys already changed passwords and security questions on two accounts and they are gone for good. Yahoo doesn't have a safety that locks you out after three password attempts. You can try forever, so it's kind of easy to break in to someone's account & take it over.)

What is odd is that Yahoo has had many, many hacks and we've had to change our password each time. Usually I just put the new passwords in Mac Mail -Preferences and the Mac Mail works fine. Not Today!

Do any of you know anything I can do to make these work again in Mac Mail? I sure appreciate your help.

Enjoy This Day!
Paul

View attachment Pop Up Box.pdf

Paul,

Have you checked to see if sbcglobal supports having different password for web access versus POP versus IMAP? Have you verified that the password change you did propagated everywhere? Is the access method you're trying to use still enabled on the account?

Does this help out at all in terms of at least ensuring you're using a supported method of accessing the mail?

https://www.att.com/esupport/article.html#!/dsl-high-speed/KM1010523

Yahoo---my old iMac has started that also. It is POP. Box keeps popping up saying it does not recognize password. After the second or third time I hit cancel and my emails all come through and/or go out. Strange indeed.

Ember1205 said:

Paul,

Have you checked to see if sbcglobal supports having different password for web access versus POP versus IMAP? Have you verified that the password change you did propagated everywhere? Is the access method you're trying to use still enabled on the account?

Does this help out at all in terms of at least ensuring you're using a supported method of accessing the mail?

https://www.att.com/esupport/article.html#!/dsl-high-speed/KM1010523

Click to expand...

Hello Ember 1205 & Thank You for helping out.
Thanks for the link to the article. My settings match the ones required. All was working up until I had to change passwords. Then it went wonky.

To be honest, I'm confused about what you wrote. I'm really lousy at mail and internet stuff.
You asked if sbcglobal allows different password for web access vs. POP vs. IMAP. I used that same password for web & POP. For example, if my password to go on line access for mail was changed to "XWQA", I inserted "XWQA" as the password in Mac Mail. (These are POP addresses.)

When you asked if the password propagated everywhere, it made me think of looking in Keychain Access app. (Mail preferences doesn't display the password). Keychain Access app has me even more confused. For each of the addresses, it shows passwords that were changed over a year ago. There have been two different ones since then.
That part I can't figure out. Shouldn't Keychain Access have either the one I just changed to or the one I was using up until the most recent change? (I'm logged in as administrator, so I assume I'm getting the real list.) I wonder if I should manually change the password is Keychain Access app or if it will really mess up the works.

Thank You again for helping. The Keychain really has me stumped now.
Paul

What I meant by the "everywhere" piece was in relation to allowing password per service.

For example: If you change your account password, is that now the password for ALL of the various access methods or would you have to go and change the PW for POP/IMAP separately?

Try this...

Create a new user account on your machine and log in as that user. Set up mail for the account giving you fits and see if a clean setup works correctly. If it does, then something in your settings / profile on the Mac needs attention.

Also, if you're able, I suggest you not use POP and use IMAP instead. It's much more flexible in terms of being able to access the same mail from all devices. The one downside is that because mail stays on the server, you have to be more aware of mailbox size limits and will need to ensure you delete mail accordingly. Back to the flip side, however, I've NEVER had a mailbox size warning from Yahoo!, Hotmail, or Gmail no matter how much mail I've kept in there.

Thanks Ember for the explanations. I think I understand now.

To change the password is a 3-step process.
I have to log in at Yahoo (they handle sbcglobal mail) and change it there.
Next you get re-directed to an AT&T page & have to change the passwrod there, too.
The next step is to go to Mac Mail - Preferences and change it on the preferences screen.
So, I think this means the same password is used for POP & IMAP

I tried your advice and created a new user on the Mac and set up Mail.
The new user account's Mail app gives the pop-up box asking for the password. It then tells me it is unable to verify the password. I tried a couple of re-starts of Mail and of the computer. Still no luck.

Just to check if the problem is with Yahoo (sbcglobal) mail only, I set up my Gmail accounts and they work fine in the new user account (and the old ones).

I wonder if the Keychain Access app's old passwords are suddenly causing this problem? But, conversely, those passwords are not the most recent pre-change passwords. This makes me wonder what Keychain Access app is supposed to have.

Is it possible that you have the SMTP configuration of the setup wrong? And it's trying to use a wrong port or something? I don't remember if the Mail client will try both receive and send options when starting up or just receive.

Thanks Again Ember for replying & helping me with this. I'm learning a lot from your posts.

I checked Mail - Preferences to investigate the port. It only gives one port under "Advanced" so I don't know if it's the sending or receiving port. Checking with Yahoo's pages, they ask for Port 995 and that's the setting in Mail -Preferences. (Yahoo is the way sbcglobal accounts use mail. They use smtp.att.yahoo.com

I tried deleting all the Mail POP sbcglobal Account passwords from Keychain. There was one entry for each account.
I left the SMTP entry in Keychain app. There was only one listed & it has only one of the e-mail addresses listed. It has the old password.

Then I re-started the OS X. Mail then worked fine on the troublesome accounts- for a while.... (Oddly it never asked for a password).

Next, the accounts failed again. On a new re-start of the computer, they worked for a while, then quit. Using Safari and going Yahoo always lets me use Mail, so I think that means the server at Yahoo is OK.

Next, I tried deleting the SMTP entry from Keychain app since it had the old password. The accounts will sometimes send & receive & sometimes not. No pop-up arrives asking for a password & Keychain App doesn't have any entries for the Yahoo accounts.

What most confuses me are that Mail never asks for a password, yet none are in Keychain app and that it sometimes works now.

Since OS X has usually been good about fixing its glitches behind the scenes, do you you think I should wait to see if it straightens out? Or, should I delete all the offending sbcglobal accounts from Apple Mail & start over?

Thanks Again for all of your advice. I really appreciate the time you're spending helping & teaching me about Mail.
Paul

POP/IMAP are using to retrieve messages and SMTP is used to send them. Typically, POP and IMAP use standard ports while SMTP is most often pushed off to a non-standard port for use from home. POP defaults to 110 (encrypted security typically moves it to 995) and IMAP to 143 (encrypted security typically moves it to 993). SMTP uses 25 and no authentication as a standard but home clients tend to get moved to non-standard ports (typically 465) and requires authentication.

You sort of have to follow the flow when you're looking at the configuration to understand if you're looking at sending or receiving settings.

I find it odd that you can get it to work for a while without an issue then it sort of konks out again. When it appeared to be working, were you able to receive AND send new emails?

Thank You Once Again, Ember1205!
I dug a bit deeper into Mail - Preferences and found if I went to "Edit SMTP Server List" that the outgoing port is 587 & it has the new password. The incoming password is also the new one and the port shown in "Advanced" is 995.

Keychain Access App still has no entries for the sbcglobal accounts. (It used to have entries with the old passwords, but I deleted them the other day in an attempt to generate new entries to fix the problem.) The non-sbcglobal accounts (wowway.com & gmail) do have entries in Keychain Access app.

I've done a bunch of test messages back & forth. For the last day, the accounts have been working to send & receive, but with a delay. If I send a message to one of the accounts from a non-sbcglobal account, it may take an hour to show up in the inbox. I am supposing this is a delay at Yahoo, not locally.

The two things that still puzzle me are: How did this get fixed? I have no idea what I did to correct the problem, of if it was "Mac Magic". The other puzzlement is why there are no entries in Keychain Access App. Of course, I won't mess with Keychain since stuff is working.

Once again, I sure am learning quite a bit from your advice - and it's very interesting to finally find out how Mail works.

Enjoy Today!
Paul

Paul,

Glad things seem to be working. It's interesting that you aren't seeing PW's show back up in Keychain. Under iCloud and Passwords, I can locate the com.apple.account.IMAP, SMTP, and Yahoo entries for a number of different accounts, and some show having been updated in the not-too-distant past. I would expect yours should re-appear there.

As far as how it got fixed, I suspect that you had some conflicting settings in a couple of places. You cleared out the Keychain info and that may well have cleaned it up.

I wish to apologize for my delay in replying. I wanted to wait to see if the passwords showed back up in Keychain Access app. After 6 days, they aran't there yet, but the troublesome accounts are still working.
For fun, I'll periodically check Keychain Access app to see if the passwords eventually arrive.

Thanks Again for your help & the education. (Which, of course, lead me to study more about how internet mail systems work.)
Enjoy This Day!
Paul