Home Forums Mac Software Mac Applications What's with Keychain Access?

A while back I reported (here) a keychain issue that was affecting Mail.app in both my Leopard and Snow Leopard volumes; I later discovered that the issue also affected Keychain Access's interaction with my AirPort Base Station.

In response to the issue I trashed KA and reinstalled it with Pacifist, and I populated a new keychain with the items from my old keychain, but it took rerunning the applicable Combo Updater to achieve a temporary fix and an erase and install to make the fix permanent (or so I thought ) on my Snow Leopard volume.

Recently, though, I've run into a new issue... "Get Info"/Show password and "Get Info"/Show note do not reveal any info after I've verified in the case of "Passwords not saved" and my secure note, respectively, while it does reveal my password for "unprotected" items. (My Leopard volume displays the same behavior with passwords, but my secure note does display its contents... Whew!!!)

In response to this I've trashed my entire Snow Leopard keychain, created a new one, and populated it from scratch, but...

"Get Info" has stopped cooperating again, and I'm plumb out of ideas, frustrated...aggravated... Aaargh!!!

Is this unique to my deuced Mac(hina) or are others experiencing the same symptoms, and can anybody suggest a possible cause, if not a fix?

Thanks, all.

Passwords not saved means just that. Typically, it means that the first time you entered a password in a login form at a particular website, you responded to Safari's invitation to save that password for future autocompletion by clicking the Never for this Website button. Thus there is no password for that site in your Keychain.

To reset that status for any particular site, open Safari -> Preferences -> Autofill, click the Edit button next to User names and passwords, and delete the entry for the site in question. Then you should be reinvited to save your password the next time you enter it.

What you've said makes perfect sense, but I'd swear bet I've seen those passwords ...that KA saves them and the "not saved" part only applies to AutoFill. (Not to be condescending, but have you tried getting info in your own keychain to verify?)

And, at any rate, have you got any feelings about my secure note, which, by the way, running the 10.6.4 Combo just failed to restore to visibility?

Google finds reports of similar, if not identical, KA behavior going back to Tiger.

Yes.

Not sure why you think passwords would be saved in your Keychain if you permanently declined to have them saved, when asked. (Perhaps your unconscious assumption was that there would be no point in a website entry being saved to your Keychain if there were no password saved along with it; but upon reflection, you'll see that that's the mechanism by which the Never for this site option is enforced. Otherwise, you'd be asked every time—just as if you'd clicked the Not now button instead.)

Sorry, I can't help with your secure note issue, never having employed the tactic myself.

I've never seen an app save some kind of a "dummy entry" in the keychain to indicate that the entry was not and should never be saved.

That's always managed by the application itself, though not all apps support "never remember". Mail for example, will always ask for the password and present you with the option to save it, until you do. Form autofill data (usually saved password on web pages) saves usually does save an entry for "never" though.

In the case of the forms autofills, it's a bit of a keychain within a keychain. The autofill file is encrypted by a random password, and that password is stored in the keychain.

Hmm...I'm going to have to disagree on this one.

I just did the following (using Safari as my browser):

1. Selected www.finetunedmac.com (dkmarsh) in Keychain Access.
2. Right-clicked and chose Delete "www.finetunedmac.com (dkmarsh)" from the contextual menu.
3. Logged out of the FineTunedMac forums.
4. Logged in, was presented with the three-option dialog, and chose Never for this site.

Keychain Access now had a www.finetunedmac.com (Passwords not saved) entry.

5. Logged out again.
6. Logged in again. No dialog offering to save my password was presented.

Further experimentation confirms that entries in the User names and passwords list accessed by clicking the Edit button in Safari -> Preferences -> AutoFill, and entries in Keychain Access, are dynamically interrelated. That is, you can delete an entry from either location and it will be gone in both.

This might make it seem to one who manages web passwords exclusively from Safari that Safari is in fact responsible for the management, but I think that's just a convenient front-end in Safari's prefs for management which actually happens in the Keychain.

my mistake. I thought forms autofill was still used for form passwords. they must have passwords to the keychain. (where they belong)

That's been my experience, but when my Mail issue first reared its ugly head such was not the case, i.e. I could not delete an item from my keychain via AutoFill...the two had lost their connection. Thats been corrected now, though, and my best guess is that it had something to do with Safari's key (in my keychain) which showed a creation date of 2-2006.

As for my curious notion that Keychain Access would save a "Passwords not saved" password, you've given me pause for reflection, and I now remember discovering (years ago) that such was, as you've pointed out, not the case.

I guess I've been going to my "secure note" for so many years that it's gotten interconnected/confused with its individual components in my head. (Now, if I can only get it working again. )

Edit: I just created a new secure note; let's see how long it lasts and whether I can determine why when its contents disappear.

I've had a similar problem where an application like Safari will seem to lose touch with the Keychain and start behaving in ways I didn't expect. In my case, when looking at the keychain with Keychain Access, I discovered that for some reason, multiple entries had appeared in the Keychain for Safari, and that seemed to be what was messing things up. Changes in Safari would change the *first* entry in the keychain, but the one that seemed to matter was the *last* entry in the keychain, if that makes any sense. Deleting all the entires sorted it.

I ran into a few different issues...

Trashing the Safari item in my keychain seems to have been golden, but trashing Mail's items was a useless exercise, and when AirPort lost connection with Keychain Access I just threw in the towel and trashed and recreated my entire keychain which has since been working as expected with the exception of my secure note (which is on the verge of becoming a mission).

I had the same problem with Keychain and Apple’s Mail after upgrading from either Panther to Tiger or Tiger to Leopard (I do not recall which).

Keychains have had some changes in their format, and ones that originated in the Mac OS X public beta failed to be updated by one of these two system software updates. My solution was the same as yours, delete the Keychains for the particular application, and start again.

Hmmm... The keychain that gave me trouble was created no earlier than Panther, never gave me any trouble until a long time after I upgraded to Leopard, and ultimately bit me fatally in Snow Leopard... I dunno! :shrug:

Don't know any sure-fire solution... just wanted to mention that there are often hidden files (and sometimes folders) in the Keychains directory. [i.e., hidden via a leading dot (period) in their name.] No idea if that's any help or not.

FWIW I had keychain issues in Panther that forced me to discard and rebuild the keychain twice and I had do that a third time after upgrading to Leopard. Since the Leopard upgrade the keychains on all the various Macs I support have been golden.

I see three hidden "0 bytes" docs in /Users/Your short name/Library/Keychains; are those the ones you mean?

(Can a 0 byte doc actually have functionality?)

It occurred to me that it would be useful functionality if Keychain Access, either by default or option, remembered "Passwords never saved," but for password backup purposes only, not for use with Safari.

Anybody got any thoughts on that before I file a feature request with Apple?