1000 Limit when Downloading Emails
For years, I have been using AOL webmail (originally a Verizon account) to access my email. Then once a month I activate Thunderbird (current installed version is 102.4.0 32 bit as a POP account) to download the entire content of the AOL inbox to my desktop PC. Usually, there are between 1500 and 2500 emails in the AOL inbox and in the past, they all downloaded to my PC when I started Thunderbird. For the past 2 or 3 months, Thunderbird would only download 1000 emails and then Thunderbird stopped receiving emails from AOL.
When this first happened, I clicked on "Get Messages" and the same 1000 emails were downloaded from AOL . The messages were not removed from AOL and the Thunderbird inbox contained duplicate messages.
After trials and errors, I determined that by using the email timestamp in Thunderbird's inbox I could identify the emails that were downloaded before the 1000 email limit was reached. I then go into AOL webmail and move those 1000 emails into a folder I created. I then go back to Thunderbird and click on "Get Messages". I repeat this process until the AOL inbox is empty. I do a quick check to verify the number of emails transferred and then delete the emails in the AOL Folder I created.
This apparent 1000 email limit took affect no more than 3 months ago. Do you know if this is a Thunderbird limitation or an AOL limitation? Is there a fix? I would like Thunderbird to receive all of the emails in my AOL inbox in one bulk transfer.
All Replies (3)
I assume it is not 1000 but 10000 emails you mention?
To get more than 10,000 emails in your inbox folder you must change your IMAP server to export.imap.aol.com
And all my 10,000++ emails are in TB
change back to server imap.aol.com and again only 10,000 emails are visible.
see link to AOL.com https://help.aol.com/articles/download-your-email-from-aol-mail-with-imap
This is not a solution to my issue. I use AOL webmail (acquired when Verizon bought AOL). I let a month of emails accumulate in the INBOX (about 3,000 emails) and then offload them by using Thunderbird (POP) to my desktop PC and deleting them from the AOL INBOX. The purpose is to archive the emails onto my desktop and to empty the AOL INBOX. The offload works for 1,000 and then stops. I have waited for over 1/2 hour hoping the offload would continue, but it didn't. If I stop the offload by stopping and restarting Thunderbird (the transferred emails in the AOL INBOX are not removed, thus the same 1000 emails are downloaded and then stops again after 1000 emails were transferred. I now have duplicate emails in Thunderbird.
My work-around is to identify the emails that were successfully downloaded by Thunderbird, close Thunderbird, going back to AOL webmail and moving those emails to another folder, restart Thunderbird to offload the next 1000 emails in the AOL INBOX. This process is repeated until the AOL INBOX is emptied.
Hello idemps1
I don't have a definite answer to your questions, but after having very quickly scanned the source code of pop3 code of Thunderbird, I don't see an obvious limitation on the number of messages downloaded. On the other hand, the AOL page about Imap states clearly that the best way to get messages out of AOL is to use Imap, so it's possible that a limit has been set at the server level to avoid an excessive load on Pop3 server. It's not as unlikely as you could think because Pop3 is a very old standard that is supported only for legacy reasons, and no one is investing time to boost the performance of existing implementations, since the usual practice is to download and delete as soon as there is a few messages in the mailbox, implementations are often not very good when there are a lot of messages.
If you want to be sure, there is a way of connecting to the Pop3 and asking it some questions, but it's rather technical (connect with a textual client like openssl s_client). Note that no one can do it for you as it's necessary to be logged on. Another way is to enable pop3 logging at the Thunderbird level - I am not sure that it would work great with the number of messages involved in your case, maybe it would be useless. You can always try if you want so much to know.