[l008com]

I got me a brand new iPhone 5S. I sent to set the email accounts over through iTunes, but they have removed that ability from itunes!! So apparently, the only way to set up email accounts now, is fully manually, or via icloud keychain.

Well I can't do it manually. I have 10 email accounts, all are hosted on my own servers, so no automatic setup. And each account has it's own random 64 character password. So typing all that on an iphone, with no typos, is simply not possible. Not for me anyway.

So the only way left is iCloud keychain. But when iCloud keychain went live, it automatically synced ALL of my email accounts to my phone, instead of just the subset I want on my phone. So I went into settings and deleted all of the accounts, thinking I'd just re-sync them properly through iTunes. This was before I knew that feature had been removed from iTunes.

I have not been able to get any accounts to show up via iCloud Keychain now. Even deleting my iCloud account and then re-adding it, does not cause the mail program to re-import mail accounts from the cloud.

I also have an iphone 4s that's now an ipod touch to me, with no email. And my primary phone, with me all day, has no email. This is crazy. There must be some way to get my email accounts to sync over to my devices?!?!

[turtle777]

One safe (but tedious way) to bring over the passwords securely for copy and paste would be using Evernote. You can encrypt the notes with the passwords on your Mac, and then decrypt on your iPhone.

-t

[subego]

If you trust one of your email providers, after you get one account flying, you can save a draft with the rest of the passwords.

[turtle777]

Unless you use PGP or some other encryption, the passwords would be sent plain text to the email server.

-t

[subego]

True, but it's not connected to specific logins.

You can also drop the last character from each password and manually reenter. I've done emergency password transfers this way. Email most of the password and do the last four characters over the phone.

An alternate plan is to put in dummy characters at the front or back.

[subego]

Probably the best way is to get 1Password or LastPass.

https://agilebits.com/onepassword

https://lastpass.com/

[turtle777]

Yes, I would use 1PW myself, but it's not cheap.

Just buying it to transfer 10 passwords might be overkill.

-t

[subego]

Pretty sure LastPass has a free option.

[l008com]

Ok I just did a full restore on my old iPhone, and re-set up iCloud Keychain. This STILL did not import any mail accounts from iCloud Keychain. There must be SOME way to make this happen? I've had it happen on OS X with accounts I set up recently. But on my phones, it's as if access to iCloud Keychain doesn't really.... work.

[ghporter]

I had to have my 4s replaced due to "the dreaded 'WiFi is grayed out'" hardware failure. When I restored the new device, all my accounts were transferred. The iCloud Keychain thing sometimes takes a while for all accounts to propagate; I had one account that didn't come through, but it was only later that I found the "Glenn's iPhone wants to share your keychain" prompt on my iMac

As a work around, I have used Evernote to store passwords. It's encrypted and you can additionally obfuscate anything you like of your passwords in the document you store with Evernote. Here's an example: my home WiFi password is 63 very random hex characters, so it's not something most people (especially me!) could memorize. I made a document with 8 lines of 8-hex character groups, with my key's content sprinked throughout in a pattern I could remember. I installed the Evernote app, accessed that document, copied appropriate segments and pasted them into the WiFi key entry window, and I had it! (Which group turns out to have the "extra" character, and where is another bit of obfuscation...)

[sfederman]

A nice way to do this is to set up Apple Configurator. Using this (free) app from Apple, you can create profiles that can be transferred to your iOS devices that allow you to setup WiFi APs, VPN Accounts, Mail accounts, and many other settings.

It's an easy way to set up an iOS device without having to do so on the device.

[l008com]

I will definitely check that out!

[l008com]

Unless I'm missing it somehow, this app doesn't appear to have any settings to setup/change mail accounts on the device.

[sfederman]

I suggest you look at the Apple Configurator help, but in short, you'll want to create and install a configuration profile that contains the desired payload (with set up email accounts).