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

Just a brief comment for now. The observation that many are on AOL for free is a valid question that leads to the more difficult part of a suit. All of us will have signed an agreement, paid or no, that disclaims warranties, third-party support, etc. All of us, though, rely on AOL to provide services and act in accordance with previous practice and industry standards, so there are arguments to be made on both sides of that question for free and paid. (consideration to bind an agreement doesn't have to be financial, it could include authorization to sell my data). My thought is that even the nuisance value and bad PR of threatened litigation may get C-suite attention and it may be cheaper for them just to solve the problem rather than risk litigation.

Whether there would be an expert properly positioned to help is a question others likely know better, one of the go to for attorneys is https://www.tasanet.com and I imagine there are many industry sources. That might make the most sense as a first step, as if we were ever to decide to try and engage a class action firm, having an expert already on board would make that much easier. It would be helpful to hear from those of you in the internet/email/software world if retaining such an expert would make sense.

I'm sure a first Zoom meeting would be a bit of a raucous affair and a bit much to organize, perhaps a doodle poll and a good agenda would make the effort worthwhile.

What would you sue for? For most of the people here, this is a free service. What are the damages when something you get for free stops working?

I pay so I get premium support, which means I was able to call support (before the alternate URL was provided) who assured me that there was nothing wrong. Worth every penny. (They told me that outlook and third party mail clients are not supported; this after I set them up years ago following the instructions AOL provided, and later, when they went to that app password, followed their instructions for how to get the apparently unsupported apps to get in.)

And I went to outlook years ago because of the superior searching ability, and likely some other things.

Note that after I got my inbox down below 40K by moving years of data to other folders (which are in the same mailbox so my mailbox-wide searches find things there). AND deleted my OST (with outlook down) and let it rebuild, I'm getting all my messages. AND it stopped constantly syncing as it was doing, overheating my PCs. For now. It had also been fixed around 80K when I switched to the new URL (and that caused a rebuild too).

The server being broken sounds right, I am having more problems than I care to list.

I have hesitated making this suggestion but as an attorney I am wondering about having interested parties from this group retain a class action lawyer to look into and write letters to AOL and Yahoo threatening them with suit if this is not resolved. I imagine for a reasonably priced firm to research this and send such a letter would require a retainer in the $15,000 to $20,000 range. I could assist in finding and vetting a firm and would pledge $1,000 to the fund to get it started. There could be many complications in attempting to set this up but I thought the idea should be thrown on the table.

Alternatively, I have wondered about passing the hat to retain a respected IT/email specialist who might be able to take a look at this at the technical level some of you amazing folks have gotten into and be able to reach out to them in the language they understand. I would make the same financial pledge.

A few action ideas to kick around, wondering at some point if we attempt to organize a zoom call.

Alan

For a few months now, I had the 10,000 cap working fine with no more than that in each folder using the export.imap.mail.yahoo.com setup. Today, all of a sudden every one of those folders in Outlook are now maxed at 2,000. I do have one folder that is still climbing, but why they would mess up all of the other folders which were fine for months is beyond me.

Maybe the other folders will climb over 2,000 once the other folder completes, but why they are continually screwing this up is beyond my intelliectual ability.

**** Yahoo. Really.

OK, I moved about 21K files to three folders and because it was becoming unusable, decided to erase the OST on the old computer (but still the one I'm using), and CPU was moderate but it filled so that the inbox and those three folders matched the size in the web based AOL. Before that both were running constantly -- strangely the new PC with a much more powerful CUP with many more cores, was running higher and that version of windows listed outlook's use of power as very high. Dunno what it was doing but it didn't involve eithernet I/O.

Note that before that neither had dropped after moving about 15K emails out of the inbox. Yet it was also missing many.

Well it worked. And with lower CPU usage than when it was doing nothing. Gave me a scare when I noticed that it hadn't even started the sent messages, and then that started to grow. I left it in the sent messages, and looked back later and saw a lot less than was in the inbox, and thought, "now it's cycling", but then I noticed it was hte sent messages.

So I decided to try deleting the mailbox on the newer, faster computer. Worked there too, and the power usage never got beyond moderate.

BTW, my inbox is now sitting at a little over 38K.

We'll see if it keeps working.