Mail won't retrieve more than 10,000 emails in IMAP account

Have you tried to archive some of the mail to free up your inbox or move them to a mail box "on my Mac" that you made?

It's true that they're the same company, and the problem probably originates at their end on some level. But the fact that the various clients (Apple Mail, Spark, Thunderbird, etc) all developed the problem at different times suggests that it's more complicated than just AOL/Yahoo imposing a limit. It's maybe something about the interface between client and email server.

The problem developed at different times with the various clients. So it's not just as simple as a hard limit placed in one place. There was presumably some change in the clients that triggered the change as well. Apple Mail first started experiencing it in January or February. Spark in April. Thunderbird in May. Microsoft in June, I think.

Reducing the amount of email doesn't work in any easy way. When you have 150,000 emails, getting down to 10,000 manually just isn't realistic. And there isn't a good, searchable way of transferring those existing emails to another provider and having them be searchable. So neither of those solves anything.

If Thunderbird, Spark, and Apple Mail clients are all now showing a 10,000 message limit, it’s the mail host setting the limit and not Apple and not the mail clients.

I tried this, and am deeply saddened to say that it didn't work for me. My AOL account is still limited to 9,999 mails in Apple Mail.

Related: how did you get a customer service rep at AOL? Did you pay for their support tier? I don't think they have free account support.

This is the help from the AOL support.... Thanks for letting us know. If you can see all of your emails using http://mail.aol.com, then your account is working fine. I'd suggest you to contact Apple for further assistance regarding this issue. Thanks for your understanding.

Did you try doing the same solution again? Curious if it works again or you're just stuck now. The solution never worked for me, but I'm trying to learn as much as possible, because both AOL and Apple claim it's not their fault. They can't both be right.

Yeah, tried again, and tried going back to adding the AOL account as normal. Still no joy.

But to add a twist to the story, tonight Thunderbird email app went from displaying all my 92K emails to only displaying 10000.

Yup, I had a similar experience. When this first happened in February, I tried installing the Spark app/client, and it showed all of my emails. Then a couple of months later, the same thing happened, and it got cut down to 10,000. I feel like someone well versed in servers and coding could solve this with the right info. But neither Apple nor AOL seem the list bit interested beyond just blaming each other and passing the buck.

AOL say it's Apple. And Apple says it's AOL, because the behavior is also happening on Spark and Thunderbird, even though it appeared on those services at a different time, and also happens with Yahoo.

So no one is taking responsibility. I suspect unless we can figure out exactly what is happening on a programming level, none of the parties involved will take it on. They'd all rather blame the others.

If the IMAP path works, by all means go for it and use it. But I’d wager that that path too will become restricted to 10,000 messages as what appear deliberate changes are rolled out throughout the Verizon Yahoo servers.

@adamzki - I followed your path here but I honestly can't find any screens like the one above or even a way to get ports or other data plugged into Mac Mail. They also want a "user name" and I can't see that anywhere except if I hover over my icon in Y! mail. Your note about a one time password and time out I never see. I am running Monterey and ever since the move from Catalina I am stuck at 10,000 emails and search is busted prior to those 10,000. The set up and log in throw errors right at the start with just email and password...it doesn't even recognize that using "Set up other" flow here. I went and looked around on Yahoo via browser and I have no alerts or anything and no way to update privacy policy, etc. So completely blocked right now...but I notice Yahoo! wants to charge me a support fee to ask any questions so it sounds like somebody needs to improve earnings and maybe then this will work?