Outlook downloads emails to subfolders, but not to Inbox

[#1]

I have set up my email account in Outlook on my laptop, using the same settings I use for my main PC. Outlook has connected but won't download messages in my Inbox folder. The subfolders seem to work; picture below shows count of messages in brackets.

I'm at my wits end trying to set this up. 

Assuming my plusnet email is fred@bloggs.plus.com, can someone help me with the answers to all these questions - This is the list of things Outlook needs. 

• Incoming and outgoing email server address

• Incoming and outgoing email server ports

• Does the outgoing server require authentication?

• Is the same username and password used for sending email?

  If the username and password are different, make sure you have the correct username and password.

• Does the incoming server require SSL?

• Does the outgoing server require SSL?

• Contacts server (if applicable)

• Calendar server (if applicable)

Is my account name fred@bloggs.plus.com? bloggs? bloggs+fred? I don't find Plusnet's setup guides specific enough in their guidance. 

Thanks in advance.

[#2]

Try setting the IMAP root folder to inbox in the server settings.

[#3]

Hi. I've tried that. It makes no difference.

[#4]

Did you refresh the IMAP folders?

Is should have made a difference. The appearance / position of sent, deleted and draft folders should have changed … and might not have repopulated. However if the inbox is massive / has large items in it, they might take a while to download … I’ve seen it take hours to resync a large inbox.

Also try setting the server timeout to 2 minutes.

[#5]

I have done Send/Receive all folders again. Is that what you mean by 'refresh IMAP folders'?

I have set the server timeout to 2 minutes, but outlook only shows that option for outgoing settings. Does it also apply to inbound. 

I probably do have a large number of messages in Inbox! I saw a message 'synching Inbox' appear at the bottom of the window, but that now only says 'connected'

[#6]

This looks like in root folder option needs flipping. Either inbox or nothing. Then right click on the account name and select update IMAP folders.

[#7]

Thanks, we may be getting somewhere.

With 'Inbox' in the Root folder path, clicking on IMAP folders and then Query, the resulting list only showed the subfolders; Drafts, Investments, etc.

When I removed 'Inbox' from Root folder path and repeated that process, I could then see Inbox in the folder list, but it was not showing as 'subscribed', I have added it to the subscribed folders, which now appear as Inbox, Inbox.Drafts, Inbox.Investments,  etc., and will give it some time to update.

So far nothing, so I have increased the server timeout to 4 minutes.

[#8]

No joy, though for some reason now there are multiple mailboxes being checked, despite there only being one account. These three with ticks are all the some account.

[#9]

I went back to my other PC and moved all emails in the Inbox to a subfolder called _Older. Switching back to the laptop I can now see messages in the Inbox, so it looks like Outlook was timing out on refreshing the folder. I have set the refresh time to the highest possible (4 minutes) and there are now around 250 messages showing in _Older out of about 2500 actually in there. How can I manage the rest if they don't download from the IMAP server? I've got recent messages from Plusnet about my mailbox being 75% full, but if the folders don't sync reliably it's kind of hard to fix.

Can anyone else help?🤔

[#10 · Accepted solution]

@Useless - If this isn't a recent issues relating to our email issues over the last few days, I suspect the issue is relating to our long standing issue that affects mailboxes that are heavy. The principle is that at peak times and with a heavy mailbox be it a lot of small emails or large ones, they don't come though. Same with webmail timing out and getting failed to send fetch commend if you've ever had that. 

The trouble with changing the refresh time is that if the sync fails it a while before another. The best thing I can suggest is to go on webmail and clean out the mailbox so that they sync properly.

[#11]

Hello James,

I think you are right about the heavy mailboxes. In the end, I created subfolders on my PC and gradually moved emails from Inbox into those, so that the size of the Inbox itself got smaller. I then deleted as much as I could from the subfolders. Eventually things started to improve! I'll close the call now, as I don't think there's what might be called a 'solution', for this, just a workaround.

Thanks,