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

Anonymous
2022-05-04T04:23:15+00:00

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)

Outlook | Windows | Classic Outlook for Windows | For business

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  1. Anonymous
    2022-09-17T14:28:27+00:00

    Yahoo does not acknowledge that they are limiting the number of messages we can download. They tell me Microsoft is imposing the limits. How can that be when the messages are on Yahoo’s servers? Duh

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  2. Anonymous
    2022-09-17T14:08:14+00:00

    I removed the "EXPORT" from my IMAP server setup in Outlook, and it is now syncing correctly despite being capped at 10,000 messages. For me, that is better than the sorry state of the EXPORT IMAP server. I have sent messages to Yahoo support, but they are clueless. So there are two things broken with the EXPORT server

    1. IMAP folder subscriptions are not being honored.
    2. Inbox cannot fully sync. It reaches a larger random number then resets to 1,000.

    Hopefully, Yahoo will realize that the EXPORT server is totally messed up.

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  3. Anonymous
    2022-09-17T03:34:04+00:00

    Mine got up to 20,000 or so then it recycled back to 1,000 and started from there. Now I cant get past 6,000. This is really messed up. I have totally lost faith with Yahoo after this 2nd major unannounced IMAP change, and I will start looking for a new email provider. Adios Yahoo, you are losing a 20 or so year premium subscriber.

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  4. Anonymous
    2022-09-16T23:08:31+00:00

    Stopped at 20,133. As expected. ANd less than it had when it wiped it all out and restarted. And an hour later, 20,137 (and I see at least 3 new emails in the past hour; it could be that it was before the previous email that I logged 20,133. So new emails come in but I am missing over 40,000 old emails. And the syncing is hanging again.

    This is bull. Not only did they throw another secret limit at is, they even broke the syncing, and they keep wiping it and starting over.

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  5. Anonymous
    2022-09-16T20:43:51+00:00

    Can anyone explain to me a rationale as to why Yahoo/AOL keep imposing these limits? All emails are still stored on the server, so I can't see any storage space saving advantages. Synching of new emails always took about the same time, so I don't think there would be any particular network bandwidth improvements. To me it all just seems arbitrary and unnecessary, and as I and others have mentioned extremely poor customer service.

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