Problems you may encounter when using AOL email in Microsoft Outlook
If you have Outlook already setup to tap your AOL email account and are getting ‘IMAP‘ error messages, it’s because one or more of your emails in AOL are corrupted. They may work ok in AOL’s webpage, but won’t in other programs like Outlook. To solve this problem should take you just a few minutes:
In Outlook, create a new folder in your regular set of Outlook folders (not the ones under the AOL account). Now move all your messages from the AOL account into this folder, in batches of 10 or 20. At some point you’ll get an error where a batch included the corrupted message. Now try to move just those 10 or 20 messages to the other folder, one at a time till you get an error – that zeros you in on the corrupted email.
Now log onto your AOL account using your web browser, go to your email, and find that message. Delete it.
Go back to Outlook and it should disappear (you might have to delete it in Outlook). If you have more than one corrupted email, you may have to repeat this. If not or when you’ve cleared out all the corrupted emails, you can move all the remaining messages back from the Outlook folder to your AOL inbox.
Problem solved! At least until the next time AOL’s server bungs up a message.
This problem occurs because Outlook downloads all your emails up-front from the AOL servers, so it encounters the corrupted email each time Outlook tries to sync with AOL. This doesn’t happen when using AOL on the web because you only deal with a specific email when you click on it. To complicate this further, AOL’s website may be able to display the corrupted email even if Outlook can’t.
And if you want to save that email, just email it to yourself from the AOL website – that’ll create a new copy of the email which shouldn’t be corrupted.
Why does this happen? Well, how much are you paying AOL for email services – nothing right? So what’s their incentive to make their email service work solidly with anything other than AOL? There is none, so everybody who uses AOL email has to either work entirely inside the AOL sphere (using either the AOL website to do email or installing the AOL program on their computer). Or just live with these compatibility problems.
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Author: Chris Gardner
Your Tech Coach at PosiTek.net
There are currently 1277 reader comments on published articles, care to join in? Use the Leave a Comment form below/at the bottom of any existing comments. This is a good place to ask follow-on questions on this subject.
I had this problem with a corrupted folder on aol. Outlook would not show me any new emails in my inbox, nor did it give any error messages. I installed thunderbird and found that I could not view any emails in a specific folder. I viewed the emails in the folder in aol website and decided I could just delete the folder. After that, outlook worked correctly. Hope this helps someone else. I spent many hours on this problem.
Thanks for your comment Steve, I think this problem is most common for folks who use a 3rd party program (like Outlook) to access AOL mail. AOL mail uses their own proprietary protocol for email, which is similar to (but not identical) to IMAP. AOL’s protocol appears to be much more susceptible to corruption from a variety of causes.
Just another reason I recommend folks find a better email service provider. See my note at https://positek.net/warning-readers-email/
My AOL emails are garbled in outlook. I DO PAY for AOL it is not free.
It sounds like you need AOL tech support since you’re paying them for service. https://help.aol.com/contact/ is the place to start.