OS X Mountain Lion For Dummies

Keychain Access

A keychain is a way to consolidate your passwords — the one you use to log into your Mac, your e-mail password, and passwords required by any websites. Here’s how it works: You use a single password to unlock your keychain (which holds your various passwords), and then you don’t have to remember all your other passwords. Rest assured that your passwords are secure because only a user who has your keychain password can reach the other password-protected applications.

The Keychain Access utility is particularly cool if you have multiple e-mail accounts, and each one has a different password. Just add them all to your keychain, and you can get all your mail at the same time with one password.

A special “master” keychain called the Login Keychain is created automatically for every OS X Mountain Lion user.

Here’s how to add passwords to your login keychain:

To add passwords for applications, just open Mail or another application that supports the keychain. When the program asks for your password, supply it and choose Yes to add the password to the keychain.

How do you ...