I, like many of you, have a dad. My dad, like many of your dads, has a computer. Periodically he bolloxes things, and then I help him fix it.

Today he called me because he keeps getting messages on his iMac that says "iCloud cannot connect, please open Preferences and log in to your iCloud account". Or some such. Not a virus or a trojan or a rogue website or whatever. Definitely an Apple OS system message.

He says he has never used iCloud and never set up an account, however his computer has an iCloud account set up on it. Checking through the associated apps, he has zero info in them. So he's obviously never used it. I suspect the guy (former grad student from way back) who helps him set up computers etc. used iCloud to migrate contacts from his old PC to his iMac 3 years ago when he made the switch. After the transfer of contacts, they were imported into Thunderbird, bookmarks went into Firefox, and then the iCloud data was deleted. Who knows though - my dad could have set this all up and doesn't remember doing it.

I tried getting him to go to the password recovery site for iCloud, but he couldn't answer any of the security questions. And when he chose "reset password by email" or whatever it says, Apple sent the recovery message to his iCloud account because evidently that was what was entered for the recovery email address.

And since Apple has gone to a more secure iCloud password system, there is no actual password in Keychain, so we couldn't snag it there. We tried deleting his account entirely (there is nothing in there and he uses a different email for iTunes etc.) but that process gets jammed when it asks him to turn of Find My Mac by entering his iCloud password. I don't want him to open Mail and look for an email, because 1.) it probably won't work if the iCloud log in is already jammed and 2.) it will probably spend a lot of time reorganizing his email accounts that are not associated with iCloud since they are listed in System Preferences as well & he has never opened Mail as far as he or I know.

So now he keeps getting those stupid messages every 45 minutes to go log in to his iCloud account in Preferences.

Suggestions?