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
    2023-01-19T01:03:07+00:00

    I totally agree with this being a Microsoft 365 issue - I spoke with all service providers Yahoo - Turbify - Go Daddy and Microsoft Office 365 yesterday and everyone is pointing fingers - I honestly don't care whose responsible I just want a fix. It seems like we pay for services that we do not get and not a single technical support person I spoke with knew about this, including the Microsoft Office 365 support, which I still have an open ticket with. I originally thought it was 6 months not 10000 emails until I highlighted all today and marked as unread.... Simply bad service..........................

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  2. Anonymous
    2023-01-16T05:09:00+00:00

    Read back on this long thread. In short, the email is there, AOL just set a parameter to tell your mail client to only get 1000 messages (or was it 10,000, I forget). IF your mailbox (supposedly any folder) is over 10,000 messages that truncates. It's all available at mail.aol.com or in their application.

    IF you set the incoming mail server to export.imap.aol.com (add the "export."), supposedly it has no limit or a much higher one. However, we have found that it keeps chopping any large folder down to 1000 or 2000 messages and then loads the rest over time. Messages are missing during that time, and in my case on my older PC, the index has over 100K messages to index so searches don't work.

    I moved over half my inbox to other folders under 10K messages, and they still cycle. It gets my old PC overheating, too. So even their "fix" (which is NOT a fix, just something they CLAIM doesn't do this limit), is broken. Unless they really intend to have massive data transfers a lot (SAME data, over and over again).

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  3. Anonymous
    2023-01-09T20:23:47+00:00

    In my case, it is 1K messages for each folder. I am using Yahoo (now it is owned by turbify).

    First, all folders shown up in my outlook, have no way to unsubscribe any of them, now it hits 1K messages.

    Whom to blame on? Microsoft outlook or "yahoo mail"?

    I used one spare laptop installed thunderbird, seems there is no 1K limits on it.

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  4. Anonymous
    2023-01-07T20:54:25+00:00

    Still going on here. Also messes up my index for quite a while as it either deletes all the deleted emails then rediscovers the same as they come back, or it wipes the index and starts over. Really annoying. Even the <10,000 folders rebuild, although they seem to go down to 2000, not 1000 (I know because I have several and it does them one at a time, so if I catch it early enough, I see several at 2000).

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  5. Anonymous
    2022-12-17T12:19:36+00:00

    Just caught one of my other IDS, with 2460 emails, cycled back to 1000. In no time, it was back to 2460. It IS using export.imap.aol.com (although it didn't need to -- apparently I had changed all of my accounts to use that).

    So this cycling is happening regardless of the size.

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