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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.
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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".
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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)
Using classic Outlook for Windows in business environments
Locked Question. This question was migrated from the Microsoft Support Community. You can vote on whether it's helpful, but you can't add comments or replies or follow the question.
Please see page 14 - Am unclear as to whether you have tried changing your incoming mail server in Outlook directly?
from imap.aol.com to the new export.imap.aol.com (aol)
export.imap.mail.yahoo.com (yahoo)
I use Thunderbird to access AOL, and experienced this problem, too.
I just modified the IMAP server setting, appending "export." before the "imap.aol.com",
and my "lost" emails re-appeared.
Thanks for the research, work, etc., etc, to all participants.
Paul
I have noticed the same thing with AOL, i.e., it syncs a batch of emails with Outlook and then stalls. I assume this happens when a new email arrives, which then causes the sync to re-start and then catch up to the place where it left off. I also have a large number of un-archived emails on the server (more than 150,000).
Since the "export" fix was distributed here a few days ago, I have been keeping my desktop and my laptop working around the clock waiting for Outlook to complete the sync. I'm still only about 75% complete as of this writing.
Yes, you both are spot-on about the Spam issue, describing the risk exactly. I can see we had the old behavior in all history, and with the updated imap servers, then it changed only as we all switched to the (older-type) "export" server. So this ~do not download Spam in sync~ behavior was added recently also without QA/Change management.
My question is - have you been able to contact anyone in AOL who can have a competent interaction and any productive, logical response? I've tried 3 times and the responses back to the effort have been just inexcusable. It's surely not helpful to rant, but these are total idiots. Is this a follow-up issue that will need to go to Yahoo directly?
I didn't notice the bulk mail issue, but yes it's been emptied; have no bulk filter, and both bulk mail and spam are empty (spam had been empty for years). And yes I have had legit messages flagged, so that is not good. Am I going to have to log into aol or aol mail to get them back? OK, it;s in the spam folder in webmail.aol.com; in fact Walker's reply to me went there.
Hmm, been a while. Just moved a few legit ones, and apparently I've missed a lot of deliveruIes of things I never ordered, and won a number of Ninja devices. Oh, I hope I didn't lose out by not responding. :)
BTW, on my old PC it took a few hours go get from 10i,000 to 57,000 and change, and then the search index had at least 20,000 to catch up with. On the new one (still not fully in service), it took probably less than an hour, and I had the outlook index status and the overall one from control panel. Control panel number of index entries kept updating in spurts along with the mailbox; occasionally outlook showed around 100 or less remaining (but usually zero), and at the end both said it was complete. So interesting that the new (faster) PC kept up with the indexing, AND faster. (For the indexing, I have DisableBackoff set to 1 in a number of places, so it runs even if there is activity going on.)