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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.
[!\[\](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".
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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.
I had the same issue. With the "export" IMAP server, my PC was "synchronizing inbox" for the past two days. Despite reboots, etc, it would not complete the synchronization process. I even tried rebuilding the OSTs from scratch. The Yahoo IMAP servers are obviously not functioning correctly.
I think I figured out the problem (and we can tell Yahoo that they're mistaken and wasting our time if they say we should go to Microsoft).
I wanted to see if there was any update on IMAP configuration (I'm on AOL, but I found Yahoo info first, and I assume it's the same for everybody).
It's at https://help.yahoo.com/kb/SLN28681.html (the page with the specs for adding "Export" to the server name).
As I'm reading it, I notice (red highlight is my emphasis) :
"Limitations for large folders - Folders containing upwards of 100 thousand or more emails may have issues downloading all the messages. To resolve this, move some of the email to a new folder in your account."
So I'm wondering: When/where did this come from? Or has it always been the case and they just decided to pull the trigger Sept. 15th, and changed IMAP configuration to "prove" that they were serious about "issues downloading"?
Of course the page doesn't have any date, so I try "View Page Source" and "Inspect", etc. but I'm not that tech savvy. However after some more searching, I find: https://archive.ph/help.yahoo.comThat has a bunch of historical screenshots of various yahoo pages, so I look for "SLN28681", and find four older versions (March '22, Dec. '21, April '21, and March '21).
They seemed identical to each other, but there was one difference between all of them, compared to the current version:
"Limitations for large folders - Folders containing upwards of 1 million or more emails will have issues downloading all the messages. To resolve this, move some of the email to a new folder in your account."
So sometime between March '22 and last week, they changed their protocol, didn't tell anybody, and completely misstated the situation (a maximum of 100,000 is quite different than "issues downloading").
Now that we know a bit more of what's going on, what do we do?
Meanwhile, after getting Outlook error when this all started that my mail file was corrupted (I've never had that before) I went through some Microsoft process of repairing/rebuilding it.
Since then, I haven't been able to delete anything in Inbox, Sent, Drafts, etc. because of error message: "The operation cannot be performed because the object has been deleted". So it thinks none of the emails exist?
If anyone has experienced something similar, or has any solutions, please advise.
Thanks
Worse than that; my old PC crashed several times, and feeling the back, it was really hot (I suspect the heat was the reason). The new PC (Win10) shows power usage in task manager, and outlook is "very high" at times. Not quite sure why -- while there is noticeable CPU usage, it's not that high. Didn't feel that one to know if it was hot, but at least the old one (Win7) gets hot and maybe can't take it.
Why all that? Because it's apparently spinning trying to sync, never gets past the low 20K's, starts over... repeatedly. Always shows synchronizing inbox.
As of this morning and until now, my inbox on my one PC is stuck at 25,821 messages, and will no longer synch at all. My last new message was at 9:45, and online at AOL there are a further 28 messages that have since come in. Closing and relaunching Outlook has no effect...the same 25,821 messages and no further synching. Bizarrely, my other PC is still synching and still shows all 226k messages. What a gong show!
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