I’m getting a Password Management Error. Why? How do I resolve it?
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Mailspring stores your Mailspring ID password and your email credentials in your computer’s keyring – a database that encrypts your passwords on disk using your system’s login password. (On Mac OS X, this is known as a Keychain).
Why am I getting a Password Management Error?
If you are getting a Password Management Error, it’s because something went wrong when we tried to access your computer’s keyring. This could mean that you don’t have a keyring installed on your computer, or you are using Mailspring from a user account that doesn’t have permission to access the keyring. Make sure that you aren’t on a “guest” user account or any user account without a password.
I’m on Linux (and NOT a Guest Account)
If you are getting this error on Linux, and aren’t on a guest account, it’s likely that you don’t have a proper connection to your operating system keyring. Depending on your Linux flavour, there are different possible solutions:
Gnome Desktop Environment
Install gnome-keyring and/or libsecret from your package manager and try running Mailspring again.
KDE 6
On KDE 6 you might need to force Mailspring to use the kwallet5 instead of kwallet6. Try running Mailspring from the terminal while forcing Mailspring to encrypt your passwords using the kwallet5 backend:
mailspring --password-store="kwallet5"
If Mailspring is now able to store your credentials, manually add this flag to the /usr/share/applications/Mailspring.desktop file, so that the Exec line looks as follows:
Exec=mailspring --password-store="kwallet5" %U
Other Desktop Environments
When using a desktop enviroment that is not Gnome or KDE based such as LXDE, ensure that you followed the steps for the Gnome Desktop Environment. Then, try running Mailspring from the terminal while forcing Mailspring to encrypt your passwords using the gnome-libsecret backend:
mailspring --password-store="gnome-libsecret"
If Mailspring is now able to store your credentials, manually add this flag to the /usr/share/applications/Mailspring.desktop file, so that the Exec line looks as follows:
Exec=mailspring --password-store="gnome-libsecret" %U
I’m on Windows (and I have a LOT of accounts)
Windows has severe restrictions on the amount of data we can securely store. Since we store secure data for each email account you have, we’ve found once you link more than a dozen or so email accounts, we can approach the limit of the Windows password manager.
Thanks, but I’m still getting the error.
If you still need help, we recommend you post a new topic in the Help section, with a detailed description of the issue you are experiencing. Use the #passwords tag to help others find the issue.
I am using windows and i do not have dozen of accounts, actually whenever i use 2 accounts the issue returns which is really unacceptable, on linux, it is running very smooth!
I just tried to add an account and got the error.
Wouldn’t it be better to store individual account passwords instead of all the information? I mean entries like:
mailspring:email@address.com => password/token/whatever
mailspring:other@address.com => password/token/whatever
This way there wouldn’t be this limitation and retrieving the passwords would be just a matter of asking for several keys in the keychain.
Hello,
The main limitation regarding Windows users is that you are storing the passwords as a single credential instead creating different credentials for every single handled email account, as it would be intended.
e.g. I see that there is a credential in the store for Mailspring/Mailspring Keys that stores all of the passwords, which is not the best practice.
A possible fix for this was to create and handle different credentials for every account the following way:
Mailspring/some@address.comMailspring/another@address.comMailspring/third@address.com- …
Mailspring/last@address.com
This change should remove the limit of accounts on Windows as Credential Store does not have a limit per application AFAIK.
Also, all of these should have different credential store passwords for increased security (I’m guessing that the Mailspring/Mailspring Keys currently has a randomly generated password that is stored encrypted somewhere within the application?). Even better if the email addresses as Credential Store identifiers were not stored in plain text (e.g. Mailspring/b8f23b33-b2b3-4dd3-8e71-6f95d8a55cf0 instead of Mailspring/plantext@address.com), but that might be paranoia.
This shouldn’t be a difficult change, although it could be tricky to migrate between versions without potentially losing the passwords.
It would be nice to have this feature ASAP because it is severely limiting my migration towards MailSpring having 30+ email accounts.
Let me know if I can help in any way to speed up the process.
Cheers,
John
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This should be resolved with the latest version 1.12 as we switched the way that passwords are stored by removing keytar and using the electron safe storage method now.
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Hello,
Thanks for the great news, been waiting for this fix for a couple of months now.
I can confirm it is working (for my 35 accounts at least).
Cheers,
John
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This is not a solution. I use Mailspring on 2 Linux (ZorinOs) pcs.
I have followed the instructions here and it appears to work as in, I have done sudo snap connect mailspring:password-manager-service and I was already using gnome-keyring.
I’ve signed out and re-signed in on the Accounts page.
I reconnected all my 14 email accounts and all appeared to be fine, even if I closed Mailspring and restarted it.
However the next day I have to do it all again, and again. I’ve done it 2 or 3 times on each PC so far.
Currently, when trying to reconnect an email account I get the message Your Mailspring ID is missing required fields - you may need to reset Mailspring. http://support.getmailspring.com/hc/en-us/articles/115002012491
This is a 3 year old article telling me to reset Mailspring. If I have to reset it and reconnect all my account I am just going to give up and use something else, which is a shame as it was working really well before 1.12.
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It is really strange that it stops working seemingly randomly after a while. I will try to set up a ZorinOS system and try it out there, as I did not encounter this behavior during any tests.
I’ve also tried the removing the settings directory (Linux Mint) and at first glance it worked, but once I’ve restarted it - the issue reappeared. After restarting the app - got the same error, but removing settings directory method didn’t work anymore. Then I tried running through terminal with forcing password store - worked, so I’ve added it to my launcher, but from there the issue remained.
Then I rolled back to 1.11 - works again.
P.S. at 1.12 the tray icon also disappeared.
I’ve also rolled bck to 1.11. I’m hoping it doesn’t auto update.
It didn’t work until I logged out and back into to my mailspring account.
Forgive my lack of knowledge…how can I go back to my previous version?
I’m on Linux (ZorinOS). I entered this in a terminal window
sudo snap revert mailspring --revision 523
I then had to go to the Edit>Preferences and sign out of and sign back into my Mailspring account there.
Thanks. I’m just using windows on my laptop and honestly none of that means anything to me. I appreciate the response, though.
On Windows it should work correctly. If you want to roll back anyway, you just need to install the 1.11 version. The installer can be downloaded from here.
@chrisl300 I hope that I will be able to reproduce the issue by trying the upgrade path via snap on Zorin OS, so that I can then deliver a solution.
@rustedwolf The tray icon should work if the app is correctly running without any password errors. I’ll focus on this.
John Taylor if that response was for me, it definitely does not work on Windows, and downloading 1.11 didn’t change anything.
I get security alerts from Google, as if I’ve been able to sign in…but the app does nothing but give me error messages. Never get the email that says it’s working (but sometimes get a screen that says the email has been sent).
That’s probably a whole different issue then. There was a hard cap of accounts in 1.11 that is now removed in 1.12 and it works on Windows.
I wish I knew what you meant. I had zero problems from the app until yesterday, and now nothing works, and I think I’ve probably lost everything, in terms of the ability to track the emails I needed to track.