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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.
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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.
Please see page 14 - Am unclear as to whether you have tried changing your incoming mail server in Outlook directly?
from imap.aol.com to the new export.imap.aol.com (aol)
export.imap.mail.yahoo.com (yahoo)
You need to be clear as to what problem you have. For AOL at least, there are two: The 10,000 email limit, and with that fix (more in that shortly), the SPAM folder (both Spam and Bulk mail) is empty.
I have Outlook 2016 in Win7, and Outlook 2019 in Win10.
For the 10,000 limit issue, all I had to do was go to the account properties (in one version I could get it from outlook, I think from both I could get there from control panel user accounts, mail). I didn't have to delete or create one, I confirmed that the advanced settings matched (encryption type, server (which I think is the port)). I then just added "export." in front of the existing incoming mail server of imap.aol.com, so it is now export.imap.aol.com . I think it might have been safer to do it the way I did, through control panel, so that it was not up when I changed it. (I had outlook shut down, i think). When it opened, it began getting more and more of my old emails. In the Win7/outlook 2016/6+ year old PC, it took hours with a lot of pauses; also indexing backlog kept growing. In the WIn10/Outlook 2019/less than 1 year old powerful PC, it was much faster, no noticeable pauses of any duration, and in fact, indexing kept up. It was either 0 or under 100 every time I noticed. (Most of you won't have that result -- I have a setting, DisableBackoff set to 1 in several places in the registry (that doesn't wait for the PC to be idle to index).)
For the Spam problem, it's not that bad -- I have to go to Webmail or log in AOL. That's not bad because by marking something SPAM... or NOT SPAM there it should in theory eventually learn and stop mails like that.
My experience and "fix" is for the Mozilla Thunderbird email program:
At some point in the last few weeks, Thunderbird showed only 10,000 emails on the AOL server, whereas logging into www.aol.com and accessing the emails via browser showed the full count of 33,000+ emails.
I found a lengthy thread discussing this at the following:
The bottom line to "repair" this (at least temporarily) is to change the IMAP server setting from:
imap.aol.com
to:
export.imap.aol.com
And, for Yahoo...
export.imap.mail.yahoo.com
I did this on my Thunderbird (Version 102), and now all is correct.
It did take quite some time to re-index all the "new" emails.
Good luck.
Did you use a light color for your message? It can't be read except in the email notification I got, and if I highlight the text (makes it white on blue).
In any case, I'm guessing that your Spam (or Bulk Mail) folder is empty; at least that happens for AOL users who use that "export." prefix. It is available using real AOL or webmail.