If you’re seeing strange problems with passwords on your Mac—such as having to enter the same Wi-Fi network password every single time you try to connect—it’s possible that something’s wrong with your keychain. Keychains are a part of the Mac's system of storing passwords and other sensitive data and controlling access to that stuff. You know how your computer will ask you if you'd like to save a password into your keychain? That's so you don't have to keep typing it in. It'd be a bummer if Apple Mail made you enter in all of your email account passwords whenever you needed to send a message.
This has lead me to try and figure out why the first issue is happening as I think my second issue is related to the first. I've seen suggestions that I should repair my keychain with keychain first aid. Only to find out that Apple removed keychain first aid recently. I'm running OS Sierra 10.12.2. Keychain is the password management system in macOS, developed by Apple.It was introduced with Mac OS 8.6, and has been included in all subsequent versions of the operating system, now known as macOS.A Keychain can contain various types of data: passwords (for websites, FTP servers, SSH accounts, network shares, wireless networks, groupware applications, encrypted disk images), private.
Anyway, the program that controls all of the keychains (and thus the stored passwords) that you have is called Keychain Access, so that's where we'll do our troubleshooting for the purposes of this tip.
One of the common symptoms of a potential keychain issue is this familiar but incredibly annoying alert from Mail, especially if you start seeing it all of the time:
Of course, that box can mean tons of things, from network or server troubles to your password actually being incorrect (surprise!), but it can also indicate that something's wrong with the keychain entry that's storing that password. To check it out, first open the aforementioned Keychain Access program, which lives in your Applications> Utilities folder.
Here's its pretty little icon.
Once it’s open, click on the 'Keychain Access' menu in the upper-left corner and choose Keychain First Aid.
In the window that appears, you’ve only got two options—'Verify' and 'Repair.' If you just wanna see if anything’s wrong, click 'Verify,' type in your account password, and then choose Start. If you’d like to fix problems as they're found, select 'Repair' instead. Pretty self-explanatory, right?
Whew!
If the program finds and fixes anything, try doing whatever caused you to want to repair your keychain in the first place and see if the issue’s been resolved. If not (or if the First Aid tool didn’t find anything, which is quite common), you can try some more serious steps, like searching for any keychain entries that are associated with the problem and removing them manually. So for example, if we pretend I've got a troublesome Gmail account that keeps prompting me for my password within Apple Mail, I can search Keychain Access for 'Gmail' and see what comes up:
That's…um, only about a twentieth of what's actually there. I have a lot of Gmail accounts.
I could then select some or all of those entries and press the Delete key to get rid of them, or I could double-click each one to see more details about what's stored there. If I delete an entry, Mail will request the missing password again (since Keychain Access no longer has it stored), and when I re-enter it, a new keychain item will be created. So if the problem is with one particular entry, that's an easy way to troubleshoot things.
Finally, if you're having tons of issues, a nuke-it-from-orbit solution would be to reset your entire keychain. Apple’s got a support article on that, but I really really really don’t recommend you follow those instructions unless you know what you’re getting into and you’ve got some serious problems with your keychain. If I didn’t say “really” enough there, let me do it some more. Be really really really careful with that, OK?
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Keychain Access User Guide
By default, your keychain password is the same as your user password (the password you use to log in to the computer). You can change the user password in Users & Groups preferences and the keychain password is automatically changed to match it.
If you don’t remember your previous user password, you need to reset your default keychain. Resetting the default keychain deletes all the passwords saved in the keychain, but should allow you to sync up your login password and the password stored in the keychain.
- In the Keychain Access app on your Mac, choose Keychain Access > Preferences.
- Click Reset My Default Keychain.
- In the Finder on your Mac, choose Apple menu > Log Out. When you log in again, save your current login password in a keychain.
Keychain First Aid For Macos Sierra Update
If your user password was reset because you forgot your password, and you can’t provide the old password for the keychain, you won’t be able to access the information in the old keychain, and a new blank keychain is created.
Keychain First Aid For Macos Sierra Vista
See alsoIf a Mac app you’ve already trusted asks for keychain accessIf your Mac keeps asking for your keychain passwordLearn how passwords are used on Mac