Lack of password field for accounts: Elegant ... and annoying

In Sparrow when an account is created, you enter the password in the account create dialog. When you change a password, you go to the account edit dialog and enter the new password. I don't know what Sparrow does with the password. maybe it puts it in the Macintosh keychain, or maybe it keeps a copy for itself (security problem?), but whatever it does, from the user's side the handling of passwords is intuitive.

MailMate, on the other hand, uses a just-in-time method of not asking for a password until it actually tries to connect for the first time, and not asking for a new password until it discovers that the old password doesn't work. This ends up being really annoying.

I will enter a new account and then have to hang around trying to trigger a synchronization (not really easy with Gmail) so that I can tell MailMate my password. If I change a password, I have to sit there repeatedly hitting synchronize and watching the Activity View until MailMate finally asks for a password. Sometimes it never seems to ask. I'll come back, and the account is offline, probably because MailMate doesn't have the right password for it, which I knew in the first place.

Living overseas and using VPNs, Google frequently decides that I need to change my password ("because someone in a terrorist hacker cybercrime country (i.e., anywhere but the U.S.) has tried to access your account"). So changing passwords for Gmail accounts, even though my passwords are unbreakable 50 digits of 1Password randomness, is a weekly occurrence for me.

I'd like to be able to proactively tell MailMate, "Yes, you're going to need a password for this account in a little while, trust me, and here it is. Tuck it away in the keychain now and you'll be able to use it later."