Interesting new behavior in Mac OS X 10.6 (Snow Leopard):
Services that formerly required a single authentication of the keychain (at launch) now ask every time, if the keychain is locked.
I've noticed this at least with Apple Mail and Google Contact Sync (ex: the gconsync process asks access the keychain).
The new behavior is certainly more secure (formerly, the passwords read from the keychain had to be stored somehow, to use later, thus providing an additional potential place to steal them). However, I don't agree it's worth the trade for the level of bother.
And it forces me to either:
1) Type my keychain password frequently (some risk there; ex: if someone's watching).
OR
2) Adjust the automatic keychain locking to be less frequent - which could well result in it never being locked (since it would continually be a accessed, resetting the countdown to automatic locking).
I didn't like either, so I found a way to tell Mail to check (poll) less frequently; every six hours:
defaults write /Users/mvgfr/Library/Preferences/com.apple.mail PollTime 360
(The above is to be issued to a command line prompt, all on one line. If you're not familiar with the command line, here's a beginner's guide. Standard warnings for the command line apply; if you're not careful you can do serious damage.)
This works for me, since I'm using Mail only as a backup of my mail messages; I compose and read mail in other ways.
(The Mail Preferences window allows a maximum of 60 minutes - and this is what shows when set as above, though the custom setting is thankfully maintained and not overwritten.)
Google Contact Sync (gconsync) took a little more effort; documented at the previous link. The concept may apply to other types of synching, though would require changing another parameter, since the above is specific to Google Contact Sync.
