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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315 answers

Anonymous

2024-02-13T17:36:47+00:00

CHANGE THE INCOMING SERVER SETTING TO

export.imap.aol.com

THIS WORKED FOR ME!
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Anonymous

2024-02-08T19:38:53+00:00

Jumped through the 31 tabs of answers and looks like still no resolution or work around, is there something I missed?
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Anonymous

2023-12-22T23:12:51+00:00

We are also facing this problem and we have been troubleshooting this with Microsoft for six weeks. We are now at L3 support and the issue is still not resolved. I understand the AOL Mail and Yahoo Mail have been acquired by Apollo Global Management. I wonder if this issue is an investment issue, at the expense of customer functionality, to reduce the cost of maintaining a mail server. Did anyone get this issue is resolved.

Here our details

Running Windows 11

Outlook 365 (also tried Outlook for Windows same issue)

This only happens after we created a new account profile. It was working for over 20 years.

On an another account that has been around for a while, there is no issue. It looks like this only impacting new users or users with a new profile in Outlook

We also tried the same user account on Windows 10 and it was still limited to 10000

When we configured Thunderbird, we had the same problem and we were limited to 10000 emails as well

So I agree with the last poster in that this is a host issue.

I also saw this article - https://www.reddit.com/r/Thunderbird/comments/v4ydu0/10000\_email\_limit\_via\_imap\_in\_yahoo\_email/

and also this one

https://en-global.help.yahoo.com/kb/SLN28681.html?guccounter=1&guce_referrer=aHR0cHM6Ly93d3cucmVkZGl0LmNvbS8&guce_referrer_sig=AQAAAEELBM4iam3qjjw717BOnVrH2yG2Ipq5i5PlylJrh4CVHCDTZtc3WSp-lIvU6rVN4w-jHFsTqoaoWavo3RioGBMAFGuRLBoauImSru87lK5z3jkOWVtPVbtL4FKZYZX57l0wqU6njRC4z8V5af8Wy4lnK_dUt1eAuwTQviQ-noCD
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Anonymous

2023-07-29T15:48:21+00:00

I tired the "export" insertion a few times for imap server ... back in Feb and then again a couple of months ago. Mine would go past 10,000 emails per folder, but then mysteriously go back down to 2,000 per folder right after everything was synced up. Haven't tried it since a couple of months ago.

Also, here is what MS says about that "10,000" ... they claim it's 100,000 emails per folder (not 10,000). I still believe, and always have, that this is an email provider hosting platform parameter, not an Outlook parameter:

https://learn.microsoft.com/en-us/outlook/troubleshoot/performance/performance-issues-if-too-many-items-or-folders
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Anonymous

2023-07-08T04:14:23+00:00
I also wished Yahoo web interface had a way to show Count and Size of messages
1. Per calendar year (or any specified period)
2. From: and other commonly used fields
This would have been very helpful in deciding to create folders by subject or date ranges etc. I feel that the messages in the recent few years will be much more in count and size compared to the oldest messages from the first few years that are available on Yahoo servers for any email account.

Also, a way to select messages in groups of 10000 (or any other specified number) at one go would be helpful also.
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