topic Re: IMAP not downloading inbox in Email

IMAP not downloading inbox

Dinalt — Mon, 22 Sep 2025 00:58:03 GMT

Hi all,

I received a warning email this week about the size of my inbox and thought I'd clear out some of the old mail in my daughters inbox but discovered I had to reset her Outlook. I've set her up with an IMAP login and the setting seem ok. I can send from the account and some of the sub directories are getting populated but I've been trying for hours and and the inbox still has nothing in it. Is this just the server playing up or am I missing something?

I'm using imap.plus.net on Port 993 with SSL/TLS as STARTTLS never completes the test

Re: IMAP not downloading inbox

plusnettony — Mon, 22 Sep 2025 07:54:43 GMT

The resetting of Outlook may have caused the problem here.

To confirm, can you see any emails in the mailbox using webmail? See webmail.plus.net and if PN login with username+mailbox .

Re: IMAP not downloading inbox

Dinalt — Mon, 22 Sep 2025 08:05:37 GMT

Hi,

Yes I can see all my daughters mail in webmail. I need to prune it before it gets deleted . Normally i log onto her laptop and use that to archive her old mail but it won't synch properly. Any suggestions?

Just to clarify she's always used IMAP but her Outlook stopped working so I installed the latest version of Office 365 and its synched some of her sub folders but the inbox wont synch

Re: IMAP not downloading inbox

Dinalt — Mon, 22 Sep 2025 08:19:39 GMT

Just checked and deleted messages is fully synched but sent and actual inbox are empty (on the laptop)

Re: IMAP not downloading inbox

Townman — Mon, 22 Sep 2025 17:38:13 GMT

There are two potential issues here...

With a massive inbox to resync, it is possible that it is just a long grind with the possibility that the IMAP server is timing out - set the server time out value to 2 minutes
Outlook confusion over the server file structure - difficult to explain, I have never found rhyme nor reason but sometimes the IMAP ROOT FOLDER option needs to be set to inbox

Re: IMAP not downloading inbox

Dinalt — Wed, 24 Sep 2025 09:50:35 GMT

Thanks for replying Townman,

I tried your suggestion and unfortunately it didn't work. In the end I ended up spending most of the day moving emails to a secondary folder which was synching then moving them to the off line archive .pst I'd set up.

Annoyingly I just installed Thunderbird to her laptop and it downloaded everything in one go...

So its Outook 365 which is at fault...