Why is an IMAP Inbox Only Displaying 10,000 Items When There are Many More Emails on the Server?

Anonymous
2022-05-04T04:23:15+00:00

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)

Outlook | Windows | Classic Outlook for Windows | For business

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  1. Anonymous
    2022-06-09T21:44:26+00:00

    Yahoo and AOL give everybody slightly different variations of the same BS answer that is only meant to deflect and drag the time.

    As for different dates that is exactly how distributed software rollouts work - implementations are rolled to different geographic locations at different times. Some people do not notice it right away as well. Besides, this only affects those who use desktop clients and a lot of people do not, so they won't have the same problem. I am just hopeful that enough people will react to this to make the providers do something about it.

    I wonder if we as a group can escalate this to Apollo Investment fund corporate management. Anyone with that type of expertise?

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  2. Anonymous
    2022-06-09T21:34:40+00:00

    I've tweeted something publicly - if anyone else wants to reply it may help put some pressure on AOL / Yahoo - link below:

    https://twitter.com/Richard94115209/status/1535010359848886277

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  3. Anonymous
    2022-06-09T21:19:15+00:00

    First, I'm pretty sure the support people don't know about it... although you'd think with so many people complaining about it they might look into it further. I think that either their developers made the change and didn't think it was important to tell support, or announce to the users, or they did it unwittingly. OR some or all of their platform is outsourced and THEY weren't told it was happening. Could be an option they suddenly enabled.

    The fact that my OST (or PST -- I apparently have both now and b=with current dates) was over 5G and is now around 2G confirms that I had all those messages and at the first sync after they rolled out the change, they were deleted.

    As for different dates, it could be that some people didn't notice right away, or it could be that they have different servers and didn't roll out to all servers at the same time.

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  4. Anonymous
    2022-06-09T21:16:45+00:00

    I'm not much of a twitter user either - but I think it is quite hard to get traction on a tweet. Adding a few hashtags sometimes helps - I'll publicly tweet something to AOL on the subject and see if anyone who has the same problem pipes up. I've also got someone at Apple looking into it - but I think they will conclude it's nothing to do with them.

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  5. Anonymous
    2022-06-09T21:07:12+00:00

    I have the same problem with AOL mail. It started two days ago (June 7). I called AOL yesterday and spoke to a support agent. After much back and forth and his remoting my machine and poking around, he told me to contact Microsoft. I dutifully did so, and the Microsoft technician confirmed that Outlook was not imposing any limit on any folders. So, today I contacted AOL again. After a long and frustrating exchange with an agent, a technician, and finally a Supervisor, I got nowhere. None of them were aware of any changes made to AOL's software or systems. Rather, they just kept telling me that AOL has had a long-standing limit of 5,000 messages per folder (clearly not something ever enforced technically), and that I should create separate folders and move 5,000 or fewer messages to each to avoid this limit (not an acceptable solution for me at all). They couldn't explain why the 5,000 limit was never actually applied, or why it is 10,000 messages now. And, most frustratingly, they could not escalate my call to anyone in authority at AOL to actually help me. The best they could do was suggest I lodge a complaint online with AOL. I will do that, but I don't have high hopes.

    I'm running Outlook for Microsoft 365 MSO (Version 2205 Build 16.0.15225.20172) 64-bit.

    The idea that this might be a bug and not an intentional change is intriguing. I'm not an IT expert by any stretch, but I'm wondering why it isn't affecting everyone at the same time. Would they deploy a change to different servers at different times or something like that?

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