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
    2022-06-20T22:16:53+00:00

    I doubt that a rogue change like that could slip through Change control procedures and software that Yahoo undoubtedly has.

    Possible but very unlikely. What is more likely is that we happened to find this design draft describing the change (dated from Feb 2022) in public domain, but the actual implementation documentation would never be made available to public. So we would never be able to see a document indicating that it had been implemented whenever that happened. So if I said that they implemented a draft change, that would be making a statement that we have no proof of, and most likely not correct statement either. My guess is they implemented it as a 'legitimate' (at least from their perspective) change some time after Feb 2022.

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  2. Anonymous
    2022-06-20T22:02:29+00:00

    YanTeper, thanks for spearheading the letter. I have the same story as everyone else: Been using my AOL email through Outlook forever, currently using 365, last week literally watched as my 25000 emails in my Outlook AOL inbox was whittled down to 10000 before my eyes. Please add me to your list:

    Chris Briggs

    League City, TX.

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  3. Anonymous
    2022-06-20T20:32:10+00:00

    Very interesting. Might it be worth adding to the letter that Yahoo has implemented changes to IMAP that are still in draft and should not be used?

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  4. Anonymous
    2022-06-20T19:15:40+00:00

    I did some more checking and according to IETF, the UIDONLY spec is still an internet-draft and has not been formally added to the IMAP standard. It should not be implemented for public use, which would certainly explain why Outlook and other IMAP clients don't appear to support it.

    In fact, the UIDONLY spec contains this wording:

    "IMPLEMENTATION NOTE: this document is not yet at the state where it is implementable. Please contact document authors if you want to experiment with implementing UIDONLY."

    Interestingly, there's nothing about UIDONLY that specifically relates to how many messages a client can see. I can't understand why client support for this would be needed to access more than 10,000 messages.

    (For background, UID in IMAP means "unique ID" and it is a number assigned to a message which doesn't change as long as the message itself doesn't change. UIDs have been in IMAP for years and simplify client implementation. Besides UIDs, messages also have a "message number" which is ephemeral. UIDONLY tells the server that the client doesn't need or use the ephemeral message numbers. Why UIDONLY is now needed by Yahoo/AOL IMAP clients to see the entirety of messages in a folder is a mystery and not required or mentioned by the spec.)

    And for what it's worth, 3 of the 6 authors of the UIDONLY draft are from Yahoo.

    Here's a link to the spec draft:
    https://www.ietf.org/archive/id/draft-melnikov-imap-uidonly-00.html

    And here's the IETF status page for it: https://datatracker.ietf.org/doc/draft-melnikov-imap-uidonly/

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  5. Anonymous
    2022-06-20T18:58:30+00:00

    My name (Mark Cousins) is already on the list. My email client is Outlook 365.

    Thanks for checking!

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