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Apple Mail keep asking for Gmail password

Have you ever used your Gmail Account with Apple Mail? You might have noticed that it keeps asking for your Gmail password even after you have entered it while adding the account.

Let’s find out why does this happen and what you can do about it?

There can be few possible reasons for that, some of them are quite obvious but you have missed them. Some of them are not so obvious.

Reason 1

You probably updated your password on Gmail service but forgot to update it on Apple Mail.

Apple Mail can sometimes still show you the old emails in Gmail, but while connecting to the server, it can fail. That’s when it asks you for the password again. Note that it doesn’t know that you have changed the password. It just knows it can’t get into the server.

Reason 2

Sometimes, due to the security reasons, your email provider can block other parties from getting into your account and servers.

This can be for dozens of reasons that you may not even know. It’s just for the added security. Sometimes, the email provider might think of the “entity” requesting permission to get into the servers as not authentic even if it’s Apple Mail.

This has nothing to do with the Apple Mail itself but rather with countless factors involved during signing in. If the client constantly asks for the password due to such security reasons, it will simply go away after a few attempts.

Reason 3

Google Two-step verification: This is the most frustrating cause of the issue, if you are not aware of it.

Google has an additional layer of security steps that require you to enter the one-time password sent to your mobile after you tried to sign in. If this two-step verification is on, Apple Mail might not be able to sign-in and will keep asking for password verification.

It can be frustrating because it will never show the actual problem. If you have this feature turned on, you need to either turn it off or use an app-password that Gmail offers.

Here’s what the Google support has to say about this:

“An App password is a 16-digit passcode that gives an app or device permission to access your Google Account. If you use 2-Step-Verification and are seeing a “password incorrect” error when trying to access your Google Account, an App password may solve the problem. Most of the time, you’ll only have to enter an App password once per app or device, so don’t worry about memorizing it.”

Here’s the simply way to get your App Password

  1. Go to the App Password Page
  2. At the bottom, click Select app and choose the app you’re using.
  3. Click Select device and choose the device you’re using.
  4. Select Generate.
  5. Follow the instructions to enter the App password (the 16 character code in the yellow bar) on your device.
  6. Select Done.

Now use this app password instead of the regular password when adding your Gmail account to the Apple Mail.

If you are a heavy email user of Gmail, you might need to switch your email client from Apple Mail to Thunderbird. It’s not necessary, however clients like Thunderbird or Mac Outlook offers smoother integration with Gmail services. You can use “Mail Extractor Max” as a third party tool to migrate the data from Apple Mail to these clients, if you wish to do so. You can get the free trial version to check out how the tool works here.

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