Forgot your password?

First, remember is that Adium is not an instant-messaging service. Contacting us won't help, because we don't have access to your password. We'll just refer you back to this page.

The first thing to try is looking up your password in the Keychain. If it's not there (some older versions of Adium were twitchy about deleting the password; we've since fixed that), you'll need to get it changed.

Looking it up in Keychain Access

If you don't remember what service you use, you'll first need to open up the Accounts pane of Adium's Preferences, and then refer to the List of Services to determine the name of the service.

1. Launch Keychain Access.
2. Scroll through to the list to the keychain items that start with “Adium”. Adium names its keychain items in the format “Adium.service-name.random-number”, so if you're looking for, say, an AIM account, it will be one of the “Adium.AIM.number” items. (There is no way to tell which account in Adium has which number in the Keychain. Sorry.)
3. Double-click on the keychain item.
4. Check the box labeled “Show password”.
5. Enter your Keychain password. This is probably the same password you use to log into Mac OS X.
6. Click Allow Once.
7. Select your password, copy it, and paste it into Adium's password field.
8. Quit Keychain Access.
9. Select some other text and copy it, to get your password off of the Clipboard. (You don't want to accidentally paste it into a message and send it!)

If you have multiple keychain items for the same service, you'll need to go through each one looking for the right password, assuming you didn't use the same password on all of them (and you shouldn't).

But wait—there's more!

If you use any other IM clients, such as the official client for your IM service, you should look through the Keychain for keychain items saved by those clients.

Getting your password changed

If you can't find any IM-service passwords in the Keychain, or none of them work, you'll have to have the IM service change your password. Most services, if not all, don't keep a clear-text copy of your password to send you because if they lost that database (by accident or by theft), people's accounts could be compromised. They keep only an encrypted version of the password, which is more secure, but inconvenient because it leaves changing it as your only option.

We keep a separate page with the instructions for this. See Getting Your Password Changed.