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

After 2 unsuccessful attempts when my letter to Yahoo Inc Corporate management in Sunnyvale, CA had been returned by US Postal Service, my third letter to NYC sent in September has not returned to this day about 6 weeks after.

On a small chance that it has reached the CEO and CTO of Yahoo, I suggest to those who are interested to to join me in my request/protest or whatever you want to call this. The text of my letter together with the list of people who wanted to add their names, is below. You are welcome to copy it, replace my title information with yours and mail it. And please let me know if you chose to do so.

If someone want to add any details of the .export server struggle, you are welcome to do it, I personally see no use in getting into these details.

I realize this falls far short of an organized protest, let alone class action suit, but, at least, it is something rather than nothing.

It is a chance for each of us make their voice heard and possibly make some difference. To this day I have noot seen anyone coming with a more effective plan of action plan of action

Yan Teper
address

email

                                                To: Jim Lanzone, Yahoo CEO    Aengus McClean, Yahoo CTO
                                                      770 Broadway 9th Floor, New York, NY 10003-9562

Dear Sirs:

I am writing to you to make you aware of a possible unfair and deceptive act and practice implemented by your company, harming arguably tens of thousands of your customers. I am addressing this directly to the CEO and the CTO of Yahoo Inc since no one in Yahoo Customer Care offered any other escalation path to address this issue.

As has been evidenced by the changed behavior of Yahoo/AOL Mail IMAP Servers noticed by great many Yahoo/AOL Mail customers in recent weeks and months, there is an implementation rolling across the US IMAP Servers for Yahoo and AOL Mail. It has been impacting customers at different geographic locations between February and June likely based on the IMAP Servers rollout schedule. No warning to or engagement of these customers occurred prior to the implementation of this change.

The change negatively impacted all Desktop client software that is used by Yahoo Mail customers who prefer to utilize Desktop email applications rather than Webmail. That includes all versions of Microsoft Outlook (from 2010 to the latest 365) both on Windows and on MacOS platforms, Mac Mail on MacOS, Thunderbird on Windows and possibly others that I am not aware of. I have seen complaints from many dozens to hundreds of customers. I do not have the means to accurately estimate the number of people that have been affected, but my guess, it is probably in the hundreds or thousands already, and might reach tens of thousands or more if nothing is done to fix the problem.

The direct effects of the IMAP Servers software change are as follows

1. When a desktop client app starts up and establishes connection to Yahoo or AOL Mail, the IMAP Servers that control that connection limit download of messages to Desktop client to 10000 per folder. Many of the customers prefer keeping longer history in their Desktop Inbox and limiting the number of messages greatly reduces the search ability within their own emails.
   I used to be able to search within 10yrs of my emails, now I am limited to one year or so.
2. One of the responses Yahoo and AOL support gives to people having this problem is to move emails to folders rather than keeping them in the Inbox. We could discuss the merits of that advice separately, but it is nearly impossible to follow, because the same IMAP server change limits the number of messages that can be moved as a group from Inbox to a folder to under 20. Imagine trying to move 10000 email to different folders in batches of 20 messages at a time!!?

However, the most frustrating (bordering on outrageous) part of this is how Yahoo and AOL support reacted to customer questions or complaints. They vehemently deny there was any change made to establish the message limit which is clearly not true. Some of the affected customers were able to issue an Open SSL query to IMAP Servers that returns only 10000 messages to the Inbox whereas it is expected to return all messages without any limit. Furthermore, the freely accessible Yahoo developers webpage documents that the standard IMAP API call that has been used for many years to access the email, now returns only 10000 messages, and a NEW API UIDONLY call needs to be used to download all messages without limit.
Yahoo and AOL support, while denying anything changed on their IMAP server side, direct customers to contact vendors of the Desktop client software, such as Microsoft and Apple to get this fixed. Clearly, that implies that the vendors would need to implement changes based on the NEW IMAP API to be able to download all messages without limit. Needless to say, the vendors tell us that their software does not impose any message limits and downloads what is given to them by IMAP Servers. Yahoo R&D clearly neglected to coordinate their IMAP Servers change with the corresponding required changes on the Desktop client side thus negatively impacting all of the Desktop mail client customers. That is a clear violation of the very basic rules of client server development basic principles and good practices, as well as evidence of the complete neglect for customer experience. Now Yahoo/AOL is trying to force their customers to put pressure on the Desktop client vendors to backfill their own failure to properly coordinate the changes.
Additionally, even if and when Microsoft and Apple make the changes on the email client side to use the NEW UIDONLY API, the client updates will be only rolled to the current Outlook 365 and other latest email client software. That leaves out the great multitude of customers who use older versions of Outlook and other email client software that no longer receive vendor updates.

Clearly this change needs to be reversed or backed out until such time as when it can be implemented in a smooth and transparent manner.

We are asking the Yahoo/AOL Corporate management to step in and right the wrong done to us by this cavalier and neglectful change to the IMAP servers.

Yan Teper, Yahoo mail, Outlook, USA

On the next page is the list of some of the affected customers who added their names to this letter to the Yahoo/AOL Corporate Management in order to investigate and resolve this issue.

Michael Walker, AOL Mail, Outlook, Canada

Eva Walker, Yahoo Rogers, Outlook, Canada

Hal Fogelman

Susan Gray, AOL and Yahoo mail

Philip Nowicki

Manish Naik, Yahoo India

Dave Burns, Rogers Canada

Norman Altman (AOL and Yahoo)

Alan Dumoff, Esq.

I H Binash, Yahoo mail from AT&T , Outlook 2013, USA

Mark Cousins, Outlook 365

Steven Ger, AOL mail

Chris Briggs, AOL mail, Outlook 365, USA

why are old coins rare

Since I posted that, since it was stuck, I deleted my OST and let it start again. It all came back. I've since caught it recycling at least two more times.

UNBELIEVABLE.

And note that some things can be lost when you rebuild. If you have older emails with html that requires outside pages to execute, the senders don't keep those forever, so they might not be readable after the rebuild; just unresolved links.

Mine is also cycling again.

Yesterday I looked at the sent mail and noticed it was exactly 1000. PLUS although the inbox was complete, it as syncing for a long time. Eventually I noticed my sent messages were back.

Just not I saw that it is syncing again, and by inbox (just under 40K), is in the 20K's and growing.

This is ridiculous. Can we bill them for all the wasted electricity as we run at high power drain... plus PC degradation?

Actually no, it is nut climbing; it is sitting at 26,543 showing no network activity, but high CPU (well with all my processors, shows 13.3% but power usage "Very high".

My Windows Thunderbird / AOL just started spontaneous re-syncing.

I have been using the "export.imap.aol.com" for several weeks with no other problems.

This of course is intolerable.