[MlMt] Keeps asking for mail.mac.com password

[Randall Gellens]

On 22 Jan 2018, at 7:01, Bill Cole wrote:

> On 18 Jan 2018, at 22:01 (-0500), Randall Gellens wrote:
>
>>  Mailmate keeps asking for my mail.mac.com password.  I created an 
>> app-specific one for it, entered it when creating the account earlier 
>> today, and checked "save in keychain."  Looking in the keychain, I 
>> see it.  However, MM has asked for it several times, saying it isn't 
>> in the keychain.  The existing keychain entry has modified time 
>> updated when I re-enter it.
>
> Does it actually work when you enter it manually?

It seems to.  I don’t see an error in MM.

>
> Apple's mail system has a history of authentication flakiness, with 
> periods where some nodes have required a bare username while others 
> only work with the full email address as username. Also, they have 
> been moving away from the mac.com domain for a while, and while I 
> think mail.mac.com should still work, it's fast-flux DNS via Akamai is 
> much faster (30s) than the {imap,smtp}.mail.me.com hostnames given at 
> https://support.apple.com/en-us/HT202304 and that can cause glitches.

What are the optimal servers to use?

>
> If authentication is reliably working when the password is entered 
> manually, this could be a problem with your keychain settings or the 
> specific keychain item. If you have your keychain set to lock after a 
> period of inactivity or when sleeping, an app like MM can misinterpret 
> the inability to access a keychain item as the item being gone or 
> wrong and not bother to recheck the item the next time it's needed. 
> When the machine wakes up and the keychain unlocked, the app tries to 
> fix the "bad" item with a new password.

That could be it.