High Sierra lost my Mail passwords?

[osxrumours]

Edit:

I had a much longer post than this which had edits as I learned more and corrected my previous conclusions. I've now realised that the problem is really that the High Sierra update has wiped every password from my keychain. It's not a Mail problem.

Keychain has no remains of any of my passwords. iCloud asked me to sign in when I start up my laptop. Mail says it can't access any email accounts and asks me for my passwords. Websites in Safari with saved login details require me to login again.

It may have been all of keychain that was wiped, not just the passwords. Either way, this is a nuisance and feels really sloppy of Apple to allow the possibility of this happening.

 

[bmcgrath]

None of my passwords from iCloud sync with Safari now and iMessage doesn't receive messages... I was prompted to not use my iCloud password for login when setup finished...

 

[osxrumours]

You may have lost everything in Keychain, like me. At the very least, it's where all the Safari passwords were stored. I also couldn't get iMessages on my mac to send or receive messages through my iPhone. None of the settings had changed and it said it could see my iPhone fine and was registered at both the phone number and two email addresses I used.

I turned it off on my mac and disabled everything I could on that side. Flicked on and off a few settings on my phone side and made sure text forwarding was switched back on. Enabled everything again on my mac and it works fine now. Something needed to be reset, I guess. I wish I could say what particular setting it was, to be more helpful. But it was definitely something in the preferences for iMessage on both mac and iphone that did it.

 

[bmcgrath]

You may have lost everything in Keychain, like me. At the very least, it's where all the Safari passwords were stored. I also couldn't get iMessages on my mac to send or receive messages through my iPhone. None of the settings had changed and it said it could see my iPhone fine and was registered at both the phone number and two email addresses I used.

I turned it off on my mac and disabled everything I could on that side. Flicked on and off a few settings on my phone side and made sure text forwarding was switched back on. Enabled everything again on my mac and it works fine now. Something needed to be reset, I guess. I wish I could say what particular setting it was, to be more helpful. But it was definitely something in the preferences for iMessage on both mac and iphone that did it.

I've not lost everything - I can see all other keychain passwords via Macbook, iPhone and iPad. Just my iMac is not syncing...

 

[osxrumours]

I didn't think it was my whole keychain initially until I connected all the other problems, but sounds like it's a different issue for you then. You still might want to disable and enable various iCloud and iMessage preferences on both sides to see if it helps.

 

[Dabombdiggity]

When your Keychains dissapeared gone after updating to high sierra you have to go to iCloud settings, and update every issue there. Then after that make sure Keychains is checked in the list there at icloud

 

[High Desert]

Same problem here as others. Apparently, the High Sierra upgrade did not take all of my password information and move to the upgrade. The password info is there on my iPhone, but do not see a how to get it updated on my MacBook Pro. When I go to iCloud, I do not see the password(s) anywhere there, or an option to retrieve them. Note, this is my first MacBook and I am in no way an Apple genius. Any help to restore would be great, otherwise I will have to renter by hand from my iPhone(?)
[doublepost=1508990807][/doublepost]Got mine fixed. Following recommendations found here, went to finder, saw keychain wasn't checked so did that and then it uploaded and passwords are now under Safari tab. Hope this upgrade is worth it. So far, I was happier with El Capitan

 

[tkharvey]

None of my passwords from iCloud sync with Safari now and iMessage doesn't receive messages... I was prompted to not use my iCloud password for login when setup finished...

Hi, the other day I installed the High Sierra upgrade 10.13.1 and found that my keychain files got messed around so that most of the passwords I was storing there are gone - in particular the 'secure notes' was empty, which is where I stored a lot of passwords. This has never happened to me after an OS update. Any suggestions?

 

[bmcgrath]

Hi, the other day I installed the High Sierra upgrade 10.13.1 and found that my keychain files got messed around so that most of the passwords I was storing there are gone - in particular the 'secure notes' was empty, which is where I stored a lot of passwords. This has never happened to me after an OS update. Any suggestions?

I had to sign out of iCloud on my Mac and then re-sign in and let it sync.

 

[tkharvey]

Hi - thanks for your reply. I managed to get my passwords back by doing a restore from Time Machine. Going to migrate passwords to Lastpass for better security and easier tracking.

 

[JonaM]

I found that the problem was that during the upgrade it had renamed the login keychain to login_renamed_1 ( I suspect because I had a different password on the keychain to my login password and it therefore couldn't open it during the upgrade so very unhelpfully decided to bin my old keychain).
Copying the renamed one back or restoring from backup fixes this

 

[tkharvey]

I found that the problem was that during the upgrade it had renamed the login keychain to login_renamed_1 ( I suspect because I had a different password on the keychain to my login password and it therefore couldn't open it during the upgrade so very unhelpfully decided to bin my old keychain).
Copying the renamed one back or restoring from backup fixes this

[doublepost=1514823704][/doublepost]Thanks JonaM for your reply. That sounds like a plausible explanation. I too have two different passwords for my login and keychain. I haven't yet got back to running the upgrade again since restoring 10.12.6, migrating passwords away from keychain takes some time, but will be easier to manage in the long run. I will bear your advice in mind when I do run the upgrade and see what happens.

 

[GianniW]

I found that the problem was that during the upgrade it had renamed the login keychain to login_renamed_1 ( I suspect because I had a different password on the keychain to my login password and it therefore couldn't open it during the upgrade so very unhelpfully decided to bin my old keychain).
Copying the renamed one back or restoring from backup fixes this

Hi and thanks - wondering how you found "renamed the login keychain to login_renamed_1"?

 

[tkharvey]

Hi and thanks - wondering how you found "renamed the login keychain to login_renamed_1"?

I had a look for login_renamed_1 and couldn't find it. Anyway it doesn't matter now as I've migrated all my passwords to a secure password management, which is a better solution.

 

[BaltimoreMediaBlog]

None of these suggestions seem helpful to me. I think I'm going to re-install High Sierra from scratch, enter everything from scratch, consider suicide, then buy a non-Apple computer that doesn't do this with every single OS update!

I used to complain about Microsoft. Now I'm considering going back. They quickly fix things. Apple disputes their existence first until there's a groundswell of hatred.

 

[LarryJoe33]

Hi - thanks for your reply. I managed to get my passwords back by doing a restore from Time Machine. Going to migrate passwords to Lastpass for better security and easier tracking.

If you are going to migrate to a true password manager (which is a great idea over key chain), I would suggest taking a look at 1Password vs. LastPass. I am a recent convert from LP to 1PW. I used LP for 7 years and find 1PW much easier to use, it works much better with Safari and the support is incredibly responsive and accurate. LP also had that well documented data breech.

 

[JonaM]

Hi and thanks - wondering how you found "renamed the login keychain to login_renamed_1"?

I decided to have a look at the keychain itself after all my passwords had vanished as I knew they had to be in there and when I went into the folder with the keychains in ~/Library/Keychains I found a whole load of files that had the right size to them with modified dates around the time of running the upgrade so I looked back in time machine and sure enough those files were identical to the ones I had working fine before the upgrade
[doublepost=1523034823][/doublepost]

None of these suggestions seem helpful to me. I think I'm going to re-install High Sierra from scratch, enter everything from scratch, consider suicide, then buy a non-Apple computer that doesn't do this with every single OS update!

I used to complain about Microsoft. Now I'm considering going back. They quickly fix things. Apple disputes their existence first until there's a groundswell of hatred.

If you do have a time machine backup I would try restoring your ~/Library/Keychains folder to how it was just before the upgrade as you've nothing to loose and it may well fix it