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

2022-08-12T16:39:56+00:00

Is there anyone that will respond to me?
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Anonymous

2022-08-12T16:35:09+00:00

How can I delete all my emails that are older than 1 year?
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Anonymous

2022-08-09T21:49:54+00:00

Certainly not dissing the fix, got us back working, but because problems remain we should continue to press AOL/Yahoo. I joined AOL VIP Customer Support ($4.99 a month) and quickly got to some pretty high level help who checked and said no additional info available, they were quite interested in the problem, I think if people called and pushed it would help. The number I used for this is 855-265-8477 which is a bit hard to find.

As to exporting to be able to save, definitely valuable. What I hoped was to export, convert to a PST, go back to the regular imap server and import the old emails back but of course if you do that it just counts back down to 10,000. That is some serious sadism right there.

Also thought about setting up two accounts in Outlook, one with export and one without, so you could switch between but Outlook won't let you do that, only one account per email, not too surprising.
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Anonymous

2022-08-09T21:22:53+00:00

Agreed. I have noted in prior posts that the 'fix' may be temp, ongoing issues persistent, new ones occurring, etc. All of which I've experienced firsthand.

I pointed out the bulk folder issue in my first post, early June; I think the prevailing attitude was it was a secondary concern. 2 months later, I no longer have a bulk folder. It has reverted back to my original junk folder w/o me having initiated a single change, including updating the server settings. Spam is virtually nonexistent once again. But now... I have issues with my trash folder.

So while I realize it is an imperfect solution, in many instances, it can get ppl back up and running.

And, allow ppl to revert back after they have copied/backed up older emails.
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Anonymous

2022-08-09T20:32:32+00:00

The export solution is a great one but not complete. I have been left with numerous problems and am unclear if that is unique or if others in similar circumstances face the same issues.

The difficulty is that export.IMAP.aol.com and IMAP.aol.com are two different servers that are not integrating properly. The iPhone and iPad cannot use the export.server and when you sign into aol.com that is simply theIMAP server as well, so we are operating on two different servers that don't integrate. If I delete an item from Outlook it does delete it from aol.com but if I delete it from aol.com it does not delete it from Outlook. Deleting an email from the iPhone deletes from aol.com but not from Outlook. It seems that the export.imap.aol.com and imap.aol.com servers allow some movement to the trash folder under rules that are incomplete. I spoke at length to AOL and Apple and have not found a solution.

The other highly annoying problem that has at least been alluded to by others is poor handling of bulk mail. I have many thousands more spam emails than usual, rules do not seem to work and most go to my inbox. I think this is also because the two servers are not properly integrated. Because deletion doesn't sync, I would have to go through and delete these all twice to be able to clean up Outlook and iOS devices.

Is no one else having this problem?
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