Problem with Eudora and Keychain

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Kathy Morgan - 29 Jul 2007 04:08 GMT

Yesterday I was unable to send mail through my ISP's SMTP server, which
requires an SSL connection if I'm connecting from outside my ISP.
Everytime I tried, a dialog box would pop up asking if I wanted to
accept a certificate. I'd say yes, but the outgoing mail just sat
there.

My first thought was that I had a corrupted settings file, so I rebuilt
it (and I can't believe I was so stupid!--I forgot to make a backup copy
to revert to in case that was not after all the problem) but that didn't
resolve the issue.

I quit and restarted Eudora multiple times, thinking maybe I needed to
restart it for the changes I'd made in the settings to take effect.
Still no dice.

I started investigating the keychain, thinking maybe I had to do
something with it in order to import the certificate. My Mac didn't
seem to recognize that I had any keychains, and I think that was the
real problem. I couldn't figure out, though, what I could safely do
about it. "Help" doesn't say anything about what to do when a keychain
is hosed. :-(

It finally dawned on me to try restarting the Mac. Voila! All the
problems are gone. Eudora is happy, she sends mail just fine, life is
good again. Moral of the story: on OS X, try restarting--or maybe just
logging out and back on again would have done the trick.

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similar forum, NNTP "newsreaders" are a better way to access the
content. <http://www.aptalaska.net/~kmorgan/how-it-works.html>
Links to NNTP newsreaders at <http://www.newsreaders.com/>

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Peter Ceresole - 29 Jul 2007 08:05 GMT

> It finally dawned on me to try restarting the Mac. Voila! All the
> problems are gone. Eudora is happy, she sends mail just fine, life is
> good again. Moral of the story: on OS X, try restarting--or maybe just
> logging out and back on again would have done the trick.

I'm not quite sure, but I think a restart is the way. It certainly
works.

Of course, that was the standard solution with the classic OS, but since
OS10 came along, with its much greater robustness and stability, people
seemed to develop fantasies of infinite uptimes... And they become
reluctant to restart because it would spoil their record.

In my experience, OS10 can go a long time between restarts, certainly
weeks and sometimes months of personal use, but when odd behaviour
develops I find that a restart is often the simplest and quickest way to
sort it out.

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Peter

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Bill Cole - 30 Jul 2007 16:05 GMT

> I started investigating the keychain, thinking maybe I had to do
> something with it in order to import the certificate. My Mac didn't
[quoted text clipped - 7 lines]
> good again. Moral of the story: on OS X, try restarting--or maybe just
> logging out and back on again would have done the trick.

USUALLY, a Keychain problem should be resolved by logging out and back
in. I have seen some cases where a reboot was the only fix, but in both
of those it was made clear not by the problem persisting through a
login, but by the login just not working. In practice on most MacOS X
machines these days the inconvenience difference between a logout/login
and a reboot is minor and you might do the system well in other ways
(e.g. clean up kernel memory leaks...) to reboot when only a logout is
needed.

I also would advise that you manually back up all of your keychain items
by creating a fresh keychain and copying all of the items over. I've
seen keychains get scrambled by the system to a degree that they cannot
be read, and it is a royal pain to rebuild one from scratch. Backing up
the keychain file on disk works mostly, but if there is lurking
corruption in the file you might be replicating it.

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Now where did I hide that website...

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Mac Forum / Applications / Eudora / July 2007

Problem with Eudora and Keychain