Why is an IMAP Inbox Only Displaying 10,000 Items When There are Many More Emails on the Server?

Anonymous

I have an IMAP email account that is hosted by AOL Mail, which I download into Outlook 365. The AOL Account has emails going as far back as 2015, and until recently all of those emails were visible (and searchable) through Outlook. About 2 weeks ago, I noticed that I could no longer search for emails going back farther than 6 months ago. Those emails are still on the AOL server; I can see them if I use AOL's webmail interface (which is pretty mediocre). But they are no longer downloading into my IMAP inbox. Indeed, at the bottom of the inbox it now says I have 10,000 items.

                                     [!\[\](https://learn-attachment.microsoft.com/api/attachments/40c12e9d-b5a2-4a30-8bc4-4503de01cbbc?platform=QnA

That's the maximum. If I delete say 100 emails, another 100 emails will download from the AOL server but the downloading will stop when I hit 10,000. (When new emails download from the account, older emails are deleted so I'm just about always at 10,000 items). The full set of emails remains on the AOL server.
In my IMAP Account Settings for this email account, I have the "Keep Mail offline" setting pushed all the way to the right at "All".
[!\\ I can't find any setting in Outlook that limits the number of emails. Nor does there appear to be any setting in the AOL account that limits 3rd party IMAP mailboxes to only 10,000 items (at least not one that I can find). New emails are downloading and syncing with the AOL server, so my connection settings appear to be correct.
Is there some kind of Registry setting that is limiting the number of items that will load into this email inbox? I used to have access to all of the emails that were on the AOL server. Is there any way to get that back? One last note. I deleted the AOL account from Inbox, rebooted and then reinstalled the AOL account. It still only downloaded 10,000 items in the IMAP inbox. Also I'm using the most recent version of Outlook 365.
Thanks for any help anyone can provide.](https://learn-attachment.microsoft.com/api/attachments/e4efa42d-54c3-4fa7-b54a-ae7d93efb421?platform=QnA)](https://learn-attachment.microsoft.com/api/attachments/40c12e9d-b5a2-4a30-8bc4-4503de01cbbc?platform=QnA)

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Anonymous

2022-06-12T09:01:23+00:00

I have found some Yahoo documentation that sheds some light on the behavior at this location.

https://senders.yahooinc.com/developer/documentation

The page describes two possible modes of IMAP operation, the default with a limited number of messages; and a new mode of operation called UIDONLY that is described in the Yahoo documentation as "unlimited". This UIDONLY extension is in draft standardization with a technical specification here

https://www.ietf.org/archive/id/draft-melnikov-imap-uidonly-00.html

Some further experiments with direct IMAP interface to the Yahoo server using OpenSSL show both the origin of the message limit value of 10000 and further more allow the message count for the Inbox folder to give the true value when this new UIDONLY mode is enabled.

Partial logs from the session are copied below:

tag capability

* CAPABILITY IMAP4rev1 ID MOVE XYMHIGHESTMODSEQ UIDPLUS LITERAL+ CHILDREN UNSELECT X-MSG-EXT OBJECTID IDLE ENABLE UIDONLY X-ALL-MAIL X-PAGINATION X-UIDONLY LIST-EXTENDED LIST-STATUS SPECIAL-USE MESSAGELIMIT=10000 X-MESSAGEPAGELIMIT=10000 PARTIAL APPENDLIMIT=41697280

tag OK CAPABILITY completed

tag enable uidonly

* ENABLED UIDONLY

tag OK ENABLE completed

tag capability

* CAPABILITY IMAP4rev1 ID MOVE XYMHIGHESTMODSEQ UIDPLUS LITERAL+ CHILDREN UNSELECT X-MSG-EXT OBJECTID IDLE ENABLE UIDONLY X-ALL-MAIL X-PAGINATION X-UIDONLY LIST-EXTENDED LIST-STATUS SPECIAL-USE MESSAGELIMIT=1000 X-MESSAGEPAGELIMIT=1000 PARTIAL APPENDLIMIT=41697280

tag OK CAPABILITY completed

tag select Inbox

* 33934 EXISTS

* 0 RECENT

* OK [UIDVALIDITY 1] UIDs valid

* OK [UIDNEXT 248767] Predicted next UID

* FLAGS (\Answered \Deleted \Draft \Flagged \Seen $Forwarded $Junk $NotJunk)

* OK [PERMANENTFLAGS (\Answered \Deleted \Draft \Flagged \Seen $Forwarded $Junk $NotJunk)] Permanent flags

* OK [HIGHESTMODSEQ 57636]

* OK [MAILBOXID (1)] Ok

tag OK [READ-WRITE] SELECT completed; now in selected state

tag status Inbox (MESSAGES)

* STATUS "Inbox" (MESSAGES 33934)

tag OK STATUS completed

Note that the message count is now correct (33934).

The logs without use of the UIDONLY mode are

tag OK LOGIN completed

tag capability

* CAPABILITY IMAP4rev1 ID MOVE XYMHIGHESTMODSEQ UIDPLUS LITERAL+ CHILDREN UNSELECT X-MSG-EXT OBJECTID IDLE ENABLE UIDONLY X-ALL-MAIL X-PAGINATION X-UIDONLY LIST-EXTENDED LIST-STATUS SPECIAL-USE MESSAGELIMIT=10000 X-MESSAGEPAGELIMIT=10000 PARTIAL APPENDLIMIT=41697280

tag OK CAPABILITY completed

tag select Inbox

* 10000 EXISTS

* 0 RECENT

* OK [UIDVALIDITY 1] UIDs valid

* OK [UIDNEXT 248767] Predicted next UID

* FLAGS (\Answered \Deleted \Draft \Flagged \Seen $Forwarded $Junk $NotJunk)

* OK [PERMANENTFLAGS (\Answered \Deleted \Draft \Flagged \Seen $Forwarded $Junk $NotJunk)] Permanent flags

* OK [HIGHESTMODSEQ 57636]

* OK [MAILBOXID (1)] Ok

tag OK [READ-WRITE] SELECT completed; now in selected state

tag status "Inbox" (MESSAGES)

* STATUS "Inbox" (MESSAGES 10000)

tag OK STATUS completed

Note that this time the message count is wrong / limited.

So the situation may be that with this recent Yahoo server configuration change that the Mail client (i.e. Outlook in my case) must support the new IMAP UIDONLY extension to allow access to message counts more than 10000.

I would now have a question to Microsoft technical support: does Outlook support the IMAP UIDONLY extension? And, if so, in which version is this support introduced?
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Anonymous

2022-06-03T12:19:41+00:00

I started having the same issue with yahoo mail on Outlook desktop on June 1st. Two different PCs, two versions of Windows.

I highly doubt this is a desktop client issue, looks to me like IMAP servers introduced 10000 limit per folder on downloads .

I am trying to battle it out with Yahoo but it is very hard. AOL uses the same infrastructure don't they? We all need to start pounding Yahoo/AOL support with this issue, maybe they will do something to fix it if they get a lot of complaints
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Anonymous

2022-05-23T22:33:16+00:00

I’m having the exact same issue. Has there been any resolution to this? I can’t find anything on this issue anywhere else.
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Anonymous

2022-05-05T12:57:54+00:00

Mavis:

Thanks for responding.

In trying to figure this out, I saw the AOL Mail reference you posted. But that's an old post talking about types of AOL mailboxes, not how AOL works with 3rd party email products like Outlook. Moreover, I have checked to see if I have the "unified inbox" discussed in the excerpt. I do. I checked the setting. But it was clear in any event. I have 40,000 emails in my AOL inbox. I can see them, open them, delete them or move them around. The problem is not the type of mailbox I have on AOL.

Archiving isn't a practical solution There are 40,000 emails in the AOL inbox. I can only display 10,000, but these are the 10,000 most recent--the ones I am most likely to use. So let's say I archived 2,000 emails. A new 2,000 would populate, and then I'd archive them, etc. It would take dozens of attempts to archive the 40,000 emails.

Similarly sub folders are not a practical solution due to the time it would take to set them up and manage them. Even if I set up a series of Rules that would ruthlessly filter the inbox and move everything where it should go, that's only a prospective solution. Moreover, I don't want to move between a dozen or two dozen subfolders to read my new emails.

And I shouldn't have to. Remember, until a few weeks ago, I had access to the entire IMAP mailbox. Something happened. I can't figure out what I could have done on my end in Outlook, so either (1) I did something in the program that I shouldn't have done (which is something you would think MS would be able to identify) or (2) something happened in the Registry (which you would think MS can track down) or (3) something happened in an update to Outlook 365 (which you would think MS can track down) or (4) something happened at AOL Mail, but it doesn't have any settings that configure IMAP mailboxes in 3rd party apps.

Are there any other alternatives that I'm missing?

(By the way, I forgot to mention in my original post that I did try to use the Repair function in MS Office 365. That didn't change anything.)

So, please, let's go "through a series of steps to find the true cause of the problem." I'm here when you are.

Michael
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Anonymous

2022-05-26T15:19:40+00:00

I've got the same issue - until a couple of weeks ago I could access all my historic emails in outlook - now it is only 10,000 in the inbox
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