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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.
You will learn that the culprit here is not Outlook (don't we all love to hate Microsoft, but they are not at fault here) if you read through detailed explanations for the last 3 weeks in this forum.
There is also a letter that I am about to sent to Yahoo/AOL corporate management on behalf of the impacted users. Do you want to add your name to it?
Sorry, I am not convinced that I should put a claim in my letter for which I have no factual basis. The goal here is to make the corporate management initiate investigation into this change, I cannot do the investigation for them.
Same problem hit my desktop and laptop today. After spending a bunch of hours this afternoon and evening to no avail, I just happened to see a pop-up note appear on the screen indicating 10,000 total emails and a lesser number Unread. First time this has ever happened to me, but glad to see that I'm not alone. I knew it had to be either MS Outlook or AOL's problem when both of my computers had the exact same thing happen. Anyway, here are my stats on this:
NOTES:
A. The total size of the .OST file has not changed! Does this mean that somehow Outlook was updated to implement the 10,000 display limit? Maybe I will try adding a couple of offline folders and move the emails while disconnected from the net and see if some other emails decide to populate the screen. If it's an Outlook gremlin then there should be a footprint somewhere in the Registry.
B. The Sent Items folder was not affected.
I agree that it's unlikely a "rogue change" could get through change control processes at Yahoo, but the spec for something such as UIDONLY is supposed to be finalised before implementors deploy it, and it's clearly not based on publicly-available information. The implementation details of a particular deployment won't be made public but the standard itself must be. It's incorrect to implement a draft change if it requires action on the part of clients.
That said, as I mentioned earlier, there's nothing in the spec connecting UIDONLY with limits on number of messages so I wonder if there's some unintended side-effect, design flaw, or bug in play here. So far we have correlation but that isn't the same as causality.
I do think we should point out to Yahoo that they have implemented a function that's still in draft status and the docs say specifically not to do so.
The main message is that Yahoo need to back out whatever change is causing IMAP clients to see a maximum of 10,000 messages. This is a functional regression and unacceptable especially for those paying for and using these services in production.
I doubt that a rogue change like that could slip through Change control procedures and software that Yahoo undoubtedly has.
Possible but very unlikely. What is more likely is that we happened to find this design draft describing the change (dated from Feb 2022) in public domain, but the actual implementation documentation would never be made available to public. So we would never be able to see a document indicating that it had been implemented whenever that happened. So if I said that they implemented a draft change, that would be making a statement that we have no proof of, and most likely not correct statement either. My guess is they implemented it as a 'legitimate' (at least from their perspective) change some time after Feb 2022.