Work-around for current .Mac time-out annoyance
Apple has made a rare (and welcome) proactive move. It’s offering some advice 
to .Mac users currently experiencing a rash of annoying “enter your password” alerts in Apple Mail.
The solution is to take the account offline by clicking the “Cancel” option in that dialog and then taking the account back online again, which somehow out-foxes the problem. If not, the statement suggests, quitting Mail and restarting it will.
The post on Apple’s web site was made by someone described as a “.Mac moderator” which surprised me. I thought that Apple sacked all its discussion board staff ? Perhaps “hosts” and “moderators” are different things.
The note is a few days old and the problem seems to be persisting , but the .Mac Team is working on it.
[I've been getting them on and off, but do you think that I could get one while waiting for a screenshot for this post? No.]
[Via MacUser ]
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Tags: Apple Mail, Apple Mail Tips, entering password again and again, error message, honesty is the best policy, mac, mail.app, outage
October 10th, 2006 at 11:50 pm
Seems to be a problem with Mail’s IMAP code, rather than .mac — I’m getting the same thing both with my home IMAP server and the company’s Exchange server.
October 10th, 2006 at 11:56 pm
I get the same thing occasionally with my ISP’s POP mail. Also see it with IMAP (.Mac and Exchange).
October 10th, 2006 at 11:58 pm
Sure, this is a well-known wider problem, exacerbated by the inability to adjust the time-out period in Mail.app, but at the moment (some) .Mac users are getting them all the time.
Something has happened at Apple’s end.
October 11th, 2006 at 1:57 am
I’ve been having consistent problems with my secondary e-mail account and the workaround that Apple provided doesn’t usually work. I’ve tried contacting Apple, but no response so far.
October 11th, 2006 at 8:03 am
It is definitely a Mail.app problem since it not only affects .Mac but also Gmail and other Google hosted email. I hope that they release 10.4.9 with this Mail.app fix. It got worse with 10.4.8.
October 11th, 2006 at 8:08 am
I did notice that the .Mac problems started to show up when I upgrade to Mac OS X 10.4.8. Though, I also have two GMail accounts as well as a number of other POP accounts, and they all work perfectly. I’m guessing the problem is specific to IMAP accounts.
October 11th, 2006 at 10:45 am
since this is only happening to IMAP accounts, how many people have installed the IMAP-Idle mailbundle mentioned here previously??
October 11th, 2006 at 12:14 pm
This happens in Outlook on Windows as well.
October 11th, 2006 at 12:16 pm
Interesting. I’m not convinced that the problem – in this instance – is internal to Mail.app.
October 11th, 2006 at 1:07 pm
BS – I have been trying that and it never works. Still keep getting the enter password dialog.
October 11th, 2006 at 2:11 pm
I agree that the fix doesn’t seem to work for long each time, but I still think it’s great that .Mac is taking the trouble to offer a fix at all.
October 12th, 2006 at 12:40 am
“[I’ve been getting them on and off, but do you think that I could get one while waiting for a screenshot for this post? No.]“
Ha! Same thing happens when my wife tries to show me something that’s gone wrong with her Mac, the car, the DVD player, the dog…
October 12th, 2006 at 5:37 am
Someone on the Apple discussion board suggested that changing your account password will correct this problem. It seemed to work for me. I changed my account password through the .Mac site, and in the Mail account. The problem seemed to disappear. After changing the password back to it’s original value, I haven’t seen the problem again.
http://discussions.apple.com/thread.jspa?messageID=3292585�
October 12th, 2006 at 7:20 am
FWIW, I am on 10.4.7, and got the problem fairly frequently, but the restart-Mail solution seemed to work. I have had no problems recently, though. Has the problem perhaps been solved?