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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.
[!\[\](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".
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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.
I just checked on the status of my email after a few hours away. Now on one PC my Outlook inbox seems to be capped at 1,000 messages, which is ridiculous and utterly unacceptable. (Strangely, the other PC still shows all 226k messages from the AOL server. I don't suppose I can expect that to last, though.)
I just can't move past the low 20K's (I have something in the 60s) -- it's sitting synching my inbox, but all it picks up is new emails. I shut down one of them in case it was two clients accessing it that was causing problems. Stopped both, started one again... and this was the one that didn't have the big pauses when I had to redo it all with the new URL.
Edited: OK, after hours sitting around a little under 22,500, I started getting popups from very old messages (triggering a rule I had set). Great, moving again! NO, starting over again. I'm now "back up to" ~9000.... no, ~10,000. Bet it stops in the 20's again.
Same thing with my AOL account. Last night was fine, and now this morning it's capped at 100,000. That's better than 10,000 I suppose. What I still don't understand is why AOL is not alerting its user base in advance before making these changes.
The change has started for me as well. I have Outlook syncing my AOL email on two PC's. This morning, on one of them the inbox suddenly emptied completely, then rebuilt up to the new 100,000 message limit. The other PC is, as of this moment, still showing all 266k messages I have on the AOL server, but I suspect at any moment it will change as well.
At least this time, the rebuilding only took a few minutes. When I first moved to the "export.imap.aol.com" configuration, it took several days to re-download all my messages. Nevertheless, this is an extremely frustrating ongoing mistreatment of AOL's (and Yahoo's) customers, especially when you consider that I pay an extra fee each month for the "privilege" of having my email history with AOL, when I could move to one of the many free email service alternatives.
So they imposed another limit on us, admittedly higher than last time, but again with no notice.
BTW, both of mine restarted, and unlike yours, started low (0?) and is climbing. They seem to hit a number, freeze, then restart. The one which originally (10K lim3it) moved constantly and fast has stuck at 23,407 (I think it was stuck at that number before, not sure).
I'll leave 'em both up overnight and see if they climb again.