Level 1

15 points

AOL Inbox on Outlook for Mac stopped working

Summary: I use an aol.com email address for personal email. All of a sudden--literally--the Inbox on Outlook for Mac (desktop) STOPPED showing new mail on July 25. Outbound mail is fine. The mail is working fine on my iPhone.

Details: I happened to note when on my MacPro (Outlook 2011/Yosemite) that there was nothing in my Inbox past July 25. All the mail is coming into the phone (either with the Outlook iOS, or AppleMail) just fine. Outbound not affected. This morning, at a remote location, I fired up my MacBook-Pro (Outlook 2016/High Sierra) and it did go and fetch all the mail--but once it did that on the first startup, no more mail came in. So, the situation is across two computers, two different softwares, and two operating systems. If I check my mail using the iPhone, or webmail at aol.com, all is there and fine--but Outlook on the desktop has stopped showing me the Inbox.

Help...

PS. Settings are the only ones I've seen for AOL across many sources. Incoming mail server is imap.aol.com at port 993, using SSL. Outbound is smtp.aol.com using port 587. I had no reason to change anything on either computer, but it all started this on July 25 with no changes on my end.

Mac Pro, OS X Yosemite (10.10.1), MacPro 5,1 16GB RAM; 256 SSD; 2 x 1TB HD

Posted on Aug 3, 2018 11:57 AM

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mdsalemi Author

Level 1

15 points

Posted on Aug 8, 2018 9:01 AM

Well, I sort of figured out and solved my issue. Doesn’t explain it, and doesn’t explain what change there was that created the issue, but nonetheless here’s it is.

On the setup for AOL mail by IMAP, they provide a default set of folders: Inbox, Draft, Sent, Trash, Bulk, Archive, Drafts, Notes, Saved, Spam. When you add an AOL IMAP account to Outlook, they are there, like this:

Well, some time ago, I created a subfolder within the INBOX (nested, as it were) and created a rule such that mail from a certain group of people would end up there. I created this subfolder in Outlook, and this synchronized back to the AOL server. It functioned without issue for some time. Note, I also have the same setup on another email Inbox (Exchange, not IMAP) and a second Inbox (POP3, not IMAP) and these have worked perfectly for years, all on the same Outlook 2011 for Mac. The subfolder (it’s now gone in the screen shot above) for the AOL account worked fine until July 25. At that point, nothing synced on the INBOX side, but it did take me some days to notice that. Most of my mail is initially read on the iPhone, and the problem did NOT manifest itself there, nor on AOL webmail, nor on Outlook for iOS. Just on the desktop version.

So, just out of curiosity today, I went to webmail on aol.com, moved all the messages in the Inbox subfolder back up into the Inbox parent, then deleted the subfolder. Now, only one Inbox, no nested subfolders.

...and that solved the problem. All the mail started syncing and function is back to normal. For some reason, the AOL IMAP setup on Outlook can no longer handle nested folders in an Inbox, as of July 25. Why? That I cannot tell you.

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21 replies

mdsalemi Author

Level 1

15 points

Aug 3, 2018 2:56 PM in response to Tesserax

I did post a nearly identical question on the MS Office Support Forums, but no replies yet. I was also going to post it on an AOL support forum but I don't think they exist--just some kind of "tell us on Facebook and Twitter" stuff, which I don't use.

I've seen some pretty bizarre stuff in years past...in fact, when I moved full time from a PC to a Mac in 2011, I had signed up for a domain name at GoDaddy. And, believe it or not (probably forgotten history now) at that time there was an issue with using "Apple Mail with Yosemite on GoDaddy email servers" and when you did that, your main memory would get used up in seconds. GoDaddy stopped offering their own email (in lieu of Office365), and once I moved my domain name hosting away from GoDaddy the problem stopped. Many people were experiencing the same problem so hopefully an answer should pop up here. I just don't understand how and why it happened "all of a sudden"...

Maybe it's time to retire the AOL account.

Sep 20, 2018 12:42 PM in response to mdsalemi

Identical issue here. AOL inbox stopped working on Outlook 2011 on MacBook Air the day before yesterday despite notification "all folders are up to date". I deleted any folders created with an Outlook rule on Outlook. Here's what's driving me nuts. I went to the mail.aol.com to delete any subfolders. Outlook then syncs fine. An hour later, every folder I deleted reappears on mail.aol.com and Outlook stops working. There is no issue receiving AOL on iphone or ipad.

I've done soft restart, hard restart, power down, account delete, empty trash etc. on the MacBook Air with no luck.

My workaround is to use Apple Mail for AOL on the Macbook.

Any help appreciated.

Nov 14, 2018 1:02 PM in response to sethc5

Thanks! This solution worked for me. I was then able to rename all of the subfolders by removing the "1" from each name. I was further able to "group" my subfolders into "sub sub folders" in Outlook (2011 for MAC) and everything still synced as it should.

Many thanks!

N4afxqrp

Level 1

4 points

Oct 5, 2018 9:19 PM in response to mdsalemi

The same thing has happened to me using Outlook 2011. 2 of my 3 accounts no longer input mail from my AOL accounts. My problem started 2 weeks ago with no changes at all to my Mac.

Ortho91

Level 1

4 points

Oct 6, 2018 7:38 AM in response to Ortho91

This is a Microsoft problem and it’s drihing me crazy because I’ve got work subfolders that I have to work around with other avenues.

2Pipers

Level 1

8 points

Oct 2, 2018 9:59 AM in response to mdsalemi

I had a problem where emails deleting on my Mac was not deleting on the iPhone (AOL mail accounts).

Fix: On Mac, deleted and re-added the aol email account. NOTE IMPORTANT: you may get an account cannot be verified error message if you use your regular aol email password. You have to log into your aol email account from the web (aol.com), sign-into your account, then under security/passwords generate a specific password for the MAC app. This may be because I have two-factor turned on, - not sure. But without this, you cannot add your email account on the MAC. Now all is fixed again. If I delete the email from either the MAC or the Iphone, it is in sync.

This issue started to happen after I upgraded to High Sierra.

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AOL Inbox on Outlook for Mac stopped working