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

You beat me to it. It is a yahoo/AOL issue, starting with the fact that they took it upon themselves to cap the number of emails at 10,000 with no announcement, leaving people looking everywhere else but to them for the cause (until someone looked at the underlying dialog and found that they supplied the count of the number of emails.

The emails are there, using mail.aol.com (or the yahoo equivalent), or the app. I stopped using the AOL app years ago because their searching capabilities were pitiful. Been using various outlook versions since then, and then when this hit, I thought it was on my end until eventually I googled and found this forum. Found the workaround (add the prefix "export." to the imap server), and it got the full emails. EXCEPT it keeps cycling and presumably telling outlook that there are no emails, or otherwise calling for a sync, goes does to 1000 or 2000 per folder (I've seen both at different times).

We were advised that capping folders at 10,000 would stop it so I moved years of data to year specific folders. THOSE folders go down to 2000 (and I can see 2000 in several, eventually filling up). On my older PC especially, the indexing restarts (where it was zero, it was over 100K and slowly counts down). All that syncing and indexing causes the PC to get hot. This is ridiculous.

And to my knowledge they have never come out with a statement of what they did, presumably intentionally, the only usable word they gave is to use their web page or app. If either had been good I would have never gone to outlook.

I downloaded Thunderbird because I thought I saw a post here that said it didn’t limit posts but it did limit me to 10,000 emails from Yahoo. I think the problem is with Yahoo.

When I contacted Yahoo a few months ago, they told me to use their app on my phone or to log into their Yahoo Mail site and I would be able to search my emails. I have over 100K in my inbox so I don’t know if I can see all of them on my phone but I was able to get to the ones I needed for a legal matter.

Hope this helps

I totally agree with this being a Microsoft 365 issue - I spoke with all service providers Yahoo - Turbify - Go Daddy and Microsoft Office 365 yesterday and everyone is pointing fingers - I honestly don't care whose responsible I just want a fix. It seems like we pay for services that we do not get and not a single technical support person I spoke with knew about this, including the Microsoft Office 365 support, which I still have an open ticket with. I originally thought it was 6 months not 10000 emails until I highlighted all today and marked as unread.... Simply bad service..........................

Read back on this long thread. In short, the email is there, AOL just set a parameter to tell your mail client to only get 1000 messages (or was it 10,000, I forget). IF your mailbox (supposedly any folder) is over 10,000 messages that truncates. It's all available at mail.aol.com or in their application.

IF you set the incoming mail server to export.imap.aol.com (add the "export."), supposedly it has no limit or a much higher one. However, we have found that it keeps chopping any large folder down to 1000 or 2000 messages and then loads the rest over time. Messages are missing during that time, and in my case on my older PC, the index has over 100K messages to index so searches don't work.

I moved over half my inbox to other folders under 10K messages, and they still cycle. It gets my old PC overheating, too. So even their "fix" (which is NOT a fix, just something they CLAIM doesn't do this limit), is broken. Unless they really intend to have massive data transfers a lot (SAME data, over and over again).

I have AOL and the very same happened to me. I have emails going back YEARS and they have all disappeared. Please help bc I have tried all that has been suggested so far.