Apple Mail stops downloading emails at a certain point
I have just recently started to use Apple Mail (3.6) and set up two accounts: one POP for hotmail and one IMAP for gmail. While sending mails works fine with both accounts, the hotmail one stops downloading mails from the server at a certain point.
From the approximately 15000 mails on the server, Mail downloads about 3000 (the oldest ones, which I neither need nor want on my computer anyway) and then stops. When I click on receive new mails, it will show the connecting sign as usual. The bar on the left, which indicates how many e-mails remain on the server and how many are currently being downloaded, pops up for a second, telling me that all remaining 12000 e-mails have been downloaded in the same time span - which obviously didn't happen.
I have already tried deleting downloaded mails from my computer, thinking that there might be a limit to the number of mails saved on the desktop. Also I deleted the whole account and set it up again, but the same thing happened at exactly the same point, respectively the same email downloaded. What to do?
Thanks to everyone who can help me out with this!
MacBook 5,1, Mac OS X (10.5.8)