Tired of the 10,000 message limit with IMAP servers for email programs like Outlook/iPhone? Here's a way around it for certain servers

Lets say you use AOL or Yahoo for email, but you also prefer to use an external email program, such as the Mail app on iPhone, or Outlook on Windows.

Both of these services provide ways to do it. I won't bother to give you a tutorial on that. You can google it if you want.

This thread is to help those who use the IMAP email servers on services like AOL/Yahoo, and are running into an infuriating 10,000 message download limit. For example, let's say your Yahoo inbox has 37,000 messages. If you attempt to use the iPhone Mail app, it will only download 10,000 of those messages, and ignore the rest. The messages will still be there on Yahoo, but 27,000 of them will be missing from your iPhone Mail app!

Fortunately there is an easy way around this, albeit not made public.

Add "export." before the incoming server name, for the initial download of messages. Then change it back to normal once they've all downloaded, as it's very unlikely you'll ever need to download 10,000 messages at once again!

For example, use export.imap.mail.yahoo.com instead of imap.mail.yahoo.com

For AOL, use export.imap.aol.com instead of imap.aol.com


That's it! Would be nice if they publicized this, right?