This browser is no longer supported.
Upgrade to Microsoft Edge to take advantage of the latest features, security updates, and technical support.
![](data:image/svg+xml, %3Csvg xmlns='http://www.w3.org/2000/svg' height='64' class='font-weight-bold' style='font: 600 30.11764705882353px "SegoeUI", Arial' width='64'%3E%3Ccircle fill='hsl(128, 8%, 22%)' cx='32' cy='32' r='32' /%3E%3Ctext x='50%25' y='55%25' dominant-baseline='middle' text-anchor='middle' fill='%23FFF' %3EA%3C/text%3E%3C/svg%3E)
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)
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.
Do you want to add your name to the letter I am about to send to Yahoo/AOL CEO and CTO?
You can see the letter on this forum 3 o4 days ago
Thank you for participation and your contribution, everybody
Here are the people who signed so far
Yan Teper, Yahoo mail, Outlook, USA
Michael Walker
Hal Fogelman
Susan Gray, AOL and Yahoo mail
Philip Nowicki
Manish Naik, Yahoo India
Dave Burns, Yahoo Rogers, Outlook, Canada
You can also add your platform, Desktop client and country if you want to
Any other brave souls?
One minor but significant suggestion: please break that down into paragraphs. I know when I see a huge mass of a message I often hesitate to read it. Easier to read in smaller chunks.
But thank you for your effort.
I am the Original Poster. First, I must thank everyone who has contributed to this thread. I don't know why the problem surfaced on my system a few weeks earlier than it affected everyone else's, but I am quite impressed by the persistence and effort of the community to get this problem corrected. After the MS moderator person blew off my requests to figure out why this was actually happening (see earliest posts on page 1 of thread) I figured this was going to be one of those threads where dozens of people said they had the same problem, the individual posts were ignored by the moderators and nothing ever happened. Not only have many of the respondents actually tried to put pressure on Yahoo/AOL to correct their coding, but it looks like Mark_302 has actually found the root cause. Superb!!
I have no technical background, so I have little of a practical nature to add. But I have one observation in response to YanTeper's post (another person who has done fantastic work in trying to track this down and fix it!) and a question for those who have more expertise than I.
Comment to YanTeper: While I have no illusions about Microsoft's business practices--does anyone else remember the antitrust suit?--I don't think MS was a conspirator here. I use Outlook 365, and have the same problem as everyone else. (I was contemplating going back to Outlook 2016 to see if that solved the problem, but it is now clear that it doesn't) I don't think MS did this to get more people to migrate to the subscription model. However, you may be right that if MS does update Outlook to support the IMAP UIDONLY extension, the updated version may only be made available to 365 subscribers. Although, isn't MS still updating some of the older versions of Outlook? You would think if they're going to patch this they'd make the change on all versions that they are currently supporting. (That may be wishful thinking on my part).
This leads to my Question--now that this thread in on its sixth page, how do we get Microsoft to take Mark_302's findings seriously? Again, I don't have any technical background or knowledge of how these boards are actually operated, but from my limited experience, the moderators check out the first post or two and then ignore a thread that's been going a while.
If that's so how will MS ever find these posts so it can do whatever is necessary to support the IMAP UIDONLY extension? Does someone need to start new threads so the moderators can report this information to the software developers? How do you get a company like MS do something now that we know what the problem is?
(Given that there is a solution for the third party developers, I have a hard time believing Yahoo/AOL will do anything. They've been doing their best for a couple of years to discourage the use of third party apps to read AOL mail. It clearly appears that they want you to use their webmail so they can sell more ads.)
Thanks again for everyone's help!
Richard, I don't want to rain on your parade :-), but in the beginning I also got a response from Yahoo Customer care that engineering team was looking into it, then another asking the version of outlook for the engineering team, and, after 5 days of silence - old and friendly advice to update Outlook, and no more mention of engineering team. Let's hope you will do one better :-)