In my continuing quest to master Miami Steve, my sweet new Apple MacBook, I want to pass on this Mail.app tip. Mainly because I had a lot of trouble finding the answer due to difficulty getting the right search keywords.
If mail.app is not saving your account passwords and asking you to supply them each time you log in, then your login keychain is not set up, or at least not set up correctly. I have no idea why, though running Disk Utility corrected a couple of permission errors that might have blocked this. Still, the problem persisted after the DU fixes. Yesterday afternoon, what with the “It’s Showtime” announcement and all, was not a good time to call Apple Support; I waited on hold for 28 minutes before giving up.
I finally found the right combination of keywords and forums though, and thus the answer. Much of the material I’d found earlier said the account names and passwords should be stored in Keychain, which is a very nice tool that OS X has and Windows does not, a secure central location for this kind of information. But I never saw my data in it.
The message that gave me the answer said to fire up the KeychainAccess utility and if there’s no keychain called “login” already in it, just create it. Boom! As soon as I made it I saw a few dozen entries that got automatically added to it. No more manually entering the nine or so passwords every time Miami Steve wakes up or is rebooted. Sweet!
BillSaysThis 