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
    2022-09-02T00:19:52+00:00

    Is there an approval process still ongoing w/ regard to the limiter?

    https://twitter.com/andrisreinman?lang=en

    Jun 10 The new Yahoo IMAP server also uses the yet-not-approved IMAP extension MESSAGELIMIT https://ietf.org/id/draft-ietf-extra-imap-partial-01.html So people with large mailboxes have issues running FETCH 1:* queries as it would return a NO 🤔

    It also seems that Yahoo now forcibly invalidates the IMAP session after 1 hour. C: X IDLE S: + idling ... some time passes, until 1h since login ... S: X NO [AUTHENTICATIONFAILED] IDLE Invalid credentials

    1. Acknowledgments

    This document was motivated by Yahoo! team and their questions about best client practices for dealing with large mailboxes.

    Best I can find, no one has posted the new version of this IETF draft that splits out the MESSAGELIMIT protocol, to the extent helpful to follow continuing work: https://www.ietf.org/archive/id/draft-ietf-extra-imap-messagelimit-00.html

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  2. Anonymous
    2022-08-15T00:10:39+00:00

    So glad I found this thread and thanks to all who have been diligently pursuing this. I have been an AOL user for 30 years, and have been using Profimail for much of that time having been wedded to Symbian as a Nokia user (honestly, still better than my S22, but that's another rant). I can state that this must therefore be an AOL issue as has been said, as I doubt that there is any connection between MS and Lonely Cat, makers of Profimail.

    Will try the export server and hope that works.

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  3. Anonymous
    2022-08-13T14:55:17+00:00

    Good to know. Thank you!

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  4. Anonymous
    2022-08-12T22:35:40+00:00

    "Also thought about setting up two accounts in Outlook, one with export and one without, so you could switch between but Outlook won't let you do that, only one account per email, not too surprising."

    Actually, you can set up both an imap.aol.com and and export.imap.aol.com account, but not directly through Outlook. You need to go to Control Panel, then All Control Panel Items, then Mail (Microsoft Outlook), then click on the Email Accounts button. Then, under the Email tab, click New. Click on the radio button Manual setup or additional server type. Then click on the POP or IMAP radio button. You can now add a second account, replicating all of the settings from your export.imap.aol.com (except removing the word "export" of course) version of the account and have both accounts present when you relaunch Outlook. I've done this on two separate PCs and both worked fine. The only two tricks are that in More Settings... the Mail Account Name under the General Tab has to be different for the two accounts, and that you have to generate a new password for this account at the AOL site under your account, Account Security, then App Password.

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  5. Anonymous
    2022-08-12T18:30:46+00:00

    I am running Office Home & Business 2021 on a new Windows 11 laptop. I am not encountering the issues with numbers of emails. I submitted a post today (8/12/2022) (page 19 of this discussion thread, I think) about the issues I am having.

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