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

2023-03-13T12:34:59+00:00

ok thanks; and do you only see this cycling with the export.imap.aol.com endpoint?
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Anonymous

2023-03-11T00:38:11+00:00

I'll respond to your question about cycling.

I moved messages by years but left what has now climbed to over 30K messages in the main inbox.

Cycling: periodically some/all of the folders empty out and start over... in some cases it was over and over. My PC was overheating from all of that.

I have mostly been using outlook/AOL with the export IMAP address, on my Win10 PC (still haven't moved off the WIn7), and it's been holding ok. I just tested the WIn7, and see that the inbox was down some 10K and climbing back up -- it goes down to 1000 or maybe even zero. I have at times noticed those under 10K extracted inbox subsets were down to 1000 (all of them, and holding until other folders rebuilt. Other than that it's unlikely to catch one at the small size because it starts building.

It also wreaks havoc with the index (I moved to outlook for AOL mostly for the power of the search index), and it keeps wiping out; I have a small folder I do a search to list select messages, and it shows nothing because it got removed from the index (I think the index is emptied and rebuilt). This is a folder with 58 messages. Not sure if it empties and rebuilds; it's so small that unless it is behind others, I'd never see it. But as I said, its index entries go away.

So at least for WIn7, it is still recycling.
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Anonymous

2023-03-09T17:35:19+00:00

Thanks for the great info and feedback. I guess I'll report how I sorted myself out. I just gave in to the idea I needed to better organize my inbox and 10K was actually reasonable for a single container. Afterall, outlook will easily search across all inboxes. It took me a few night sessions using the Yahoo web interface to move messages from each year into Quartey labeled folders, let Outlook sync those and use filters and the unread views to clean up a bit. I ended up getting 10 years of messages neatly organized in a way that will be easy enough to keep up with moving forward. The biggest pain of this was that the Yahoo interface was limited to only so many headlines per page dump and it could take a while of paging down to load more from the search and then do the move. It sure would have been nice if they had a way to move all messages based on the search results rather than just what was delved into the browser memory. The Dev setting you mentioned likely is part of the interface API. I feel like it was loading 50 to 100 messages per scroll down. But for the effort I'm pleased and better off for it.
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Anonymous

I did some testing via imap to understand difference between imap.mail.yahoo.com and export.imap.mail.yahoo.com and discovered the following:

using imap.mail.yahoo.com

| &gt; openssl s\_client -connect imap.mail.yahoo.com:993 -crlf -quiet
depth=2 C = US, O = DigiCert Inc, OU = www.digicert.com, CN = DigiCert High Assurance EV Root CA
verify return:1
depth=1 C = US, O = DigiCert Inc, OU = www.digicert.com, CN = DigiCert SHA2 High Assurance Server CA
verify return:1
depth=0 C = US, ST = California, L = Sunnyvale, O = Oath Holdings Inc., CN = \*.imap.mail.yahoo.com
verify return:1
\* OK Welcome! IMAP Server up and ready to accept your request
tag login {my yahoo email} {my yahoo app password}
tag OK [CAPABILITY IMAP4rev1 ID MOVE NAMESPACE XYMHIGHESTMODSEQ UIDPLUS LITERAL+ CHILDREN UNSELECT X-MSG-EXT OBJECTID IDLE ENABLE UIDONLY X-ALL-MAIL X-UIDONLY LIST-EXTENDED LIST-STATUS SPECIAL-USE MESSAGELIMIT=1000 PARTIAL APPENDLIMIT=41697280] LOGIN completed
tag capability
\* CAPABILITY IMAP4rev1 ID MOVE NAMESPACE XYMHIGHESTMODSEQ UIDPLUS LITERAL+ CHILDREN UNSELECT X-MSG-EXT OBJECTID IDLE ENABLE UIDONLY X-ALL-MAIL X-UIDONLY LIST-EXTENDED LIST-STATUS SPECIAL-USE MESSAGELIMIT=1000 PARTIAL APPENDLIMIT=41697280
tag OK CAPABILITY completed
tag STATUS INBOX (MESSAGES)
\* STATUS "Inbox" (MESSAGES 39499)
tag OK STATUS completed
tag select inbox
\* 10000 EXISTS
\* 0 RECENT
\* OK [UIDVALIDITY 1301025799] UIDs valid
\* OK [UIDNEXT 610530] Predicted next UID
\* FLAGS (\Answered \Deleted \Draft \Flagged \Seen $Forwarded $Junk $NotJunk)
\* OK [PERMANENTFLAGS (\Answered \Deleted \Draft \Flagged \Seen $Forwarded $Junk $NotJunk)] Permanent flags
\* OK [HIGHESTMODSEQ 170930]
\* OK [MAILBOXID (1)] Ok
tag OK [READ-WRITE] SELECT completed; now in selected state
tag enable uidonly
\* ENABLED UIDONLY
tag OK ENABLE completed
tag select inbox
\* 39499 EXISTS
\* 0 RECENT
\* OK [UIDVALIDITY 1301025799] UIDs valid
\* OK [UIDNEXT 610530] Predicted next UID
\* FLAGS (\Answered \Deleted \Draft \Flagged \Seen $Forwarded $Junk $NotJunk)
\* OK [PERMANENTFLAGS (\Answered \Deleted \Draft \Flagged \Seen $Forwarded $Junk $NotJunk)] Permanent flags
\* OK [HIGHESTMODSEQ 170930]
\* OK [MAILBOXID (1)] Ok
tag OK [READ-WRITE] SELECT completed; now in selected state

using export.imap.mail.yahoo.com

| &gt; openssl s\_client -connect export.imap.mail.yahoo.com:993 -crlf -quiet
depth=2 C = US, O = DigiCert Inc, OU = www.digicert.com, CN = DigiCert High Assurance EV Root CA
verify return:1
depth=1 C = US, O = DigiCert Inc, OU = www.digicert.com, CN = DigiCert SHA2 High Assurance Server CA
verify return:1
depth=0 C = US, ST = California, L = Sunnyvale, O = Oath Holdings Inc., CN = \*.imap.mail.yahoo.com
verify return:1
\* OK Welcome! IMAP Server up and ready to accept your request
tag login {my yahoo email} {my yahoo app password}
tag OK [CAPABILITY IMAP4rev1 ID MOVE NAMESPACE XYMHIGHESTMODSEQ UIDPLUS LITERAL+ CHILDREN UNSELECT X-MSG-EXT OBJECTID IDLE ENABLE UIDONLY X-ALL-MAIL X-UIDONLY LIST-EXTENDED LIST-STATUS SPECIAL-USE MESSAGELIMIT=1000 PARTIAL APPENDLIMIT=41697280] LOGIN completed
tag capability
\* CAPABILITY IMAP4rev1 ID MOVE NAMESPACE XYMHIGHESTMODSEQ UIDPLUS LITERAL+ CHILDREN UNSELECT X-MSG-EXT OBJECTID IDLE ENABLE UIDONLY X-ALL-MAIL X-UIDONLY LIST-EXTENDED LIST-STATUS SPECIAL-USE MESSAGELIMIT=1000 PARTIAL APPENDLIMIT=41697280
tag OK CAPABILITY completed
tag STATUS INBOX (MESSAGES)
\* STATUS "Inbox" (MESSAGES 39499)
tag OK STATUS completed
tag select inbox
\* 39499 EXISTS
\* 0 RECENT
\* OK [UIDVALIDITY 1301025799] UIDs valid
\* OK [UIDNEXT 610530] Predicted next UID
\* FLAGS (\Answered \Deleted \Draft \Flagged \Seen $Forwarded $Junk $NotJunk)
\* OK [PERMANENTFLAGS (\Answered \Deleted \Draft \Flagged \Seen $Forwarded $Junk $NotJunk)] Permanent flags
\* OK [HIGHESTMODSEQ 170930]
\* OK [MAILBOXID (1)] Ok
tag OK [READ-WRITE] SELECT completed; now in selected state
tag enable uidonly
\* ENABLED UIDONLY
tag OK ENABLE completed
tag select inbox
\* 39499 EXISTS
\* 0 RECENT
\* OK [UIDVALIDITY 1301025799] UIDs valid
\* OK [UIDNEXT 610530] Predicted next UID
\* FLAGS (\Answered \Deleted \Draft \Flagged \Seen $Forwarded $Junk $NotJunk)
\* OK [PERMANENTFLAGS (\Answered \Deleted \Draft \Flagged \Seen $Forwarded $Junk $NotJunk)] Permanent flags
\* OK [HIGHESTMODSEQ 170930]
\* OK [MAILBOXID (1)] Ok
tag OK [READ-WRITE] SELECT completed; now in selected state

The only difference in the two imap outputs above is the number of emails in "exists" upon selecting inbox.

With export.imap.mail.yahoo.com I get all 39499 messages, with imap.mail.yahoo.com I get 10000 messages.

However, if you set the UIDONLY flag, even on imap.mail.yahoo.com, selecting inbox will show all 39k messages. So it seems to be having an effect.

As mentioned elsewhere, the UIDONLY flag seems to be detailed in a draft IMAP extension which was recently updated (March 3 2023: https://datatracker.ietf.org/doc/draft-ietf-extra-imap-uidonly/ ). I don't know how that process works.

My guess is none of the 3rd party tools implement UIDONLY as yet.

This seems pretty clear evidence to me at least that this setting comes from Yahoo - esp since the default tools that connect to yahoo will just use imap.mail.yahoo.com.

I found some documentation in Yahoo's developer documentation which hints at this as well https://senders.yahooinc.com/developer/documentation/#imap-modes-limitedHowever, that Yahoo documentation also talks about MESSAGELIMIT, which in the IMAP results above is "1000" not "10000", so I don't understand how MESSAGELIMIT plays into things here.https://senders.yahooinc.com/developer/documentation/#imap-modes-limitedAsAs to experienced behavior, I haven't tried using the export URL locally, as I've seen reports here about other issues that crop up. With regular imap on OSX mail, I am limited to 10k per folder.

Hopefully some imap gurus can look at this and dig further to discern other differences between the two servers, and maybe understand what is causing 'recycling' (I don't really understand that what means).

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Anonymous

2023-02-03T18:18:22+00:00

In my case, it is 1K messages for each folder. I am using Yahoo (now it is owned by turbify).

First, all folders shown up in my outlook, have no way to unsubscribe any of them, now it hits 1K messages.

Whom to blame on? Microsoft outlook or "yahoo mail"?

I used one spare laptop installed thunderbird, seems there is no 1K limits on it.

I switched to Outlook 365 from Thunderbird earlier this week, due to unrelated issues with Thunderbird. I had already hit the AOL 10K limit issue on Thunderbird several months ago, so I knew to use the "export" IMAP address when setting up my AOL account on Outlook.

Initial sync worked fine, pulling down about 26K emails into the local Outlook Inbox folder and about 7K into the local Send folder. The actual numbers matched what mail.aol.com showed.

A day or two later, I noticed that my Inbox only had 1000 (not 10K) emails in it. Sent folder still contained the 7K+ emails. I did a Send/Receive and the Inbox downloaded all of the "missing" emails. This has happened several times over the last few days. It seems to mostly happen when I delete emails in my Inbox (I get a lot of spam). A couple of times it seemed to sync up on its own, but maybe something I did triggered it. Other times, a Send/Receive pulled everything down.

Edit: Looks like I jumped the gun a bit. Just noticed that while I was away, the email count for the Sent folder dropped. Something triggered another Send/Receive because by the time I saw it, the Send folder email count was already back to about 2K, and the process was continuing. Also, Inbox folder is back at 1000, again.
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