How to Retrieve Emails in an Outlook Folder Stored on Server

How to fix the “There are more items in this folder on the server” issue in a folder in Outlook 2016 and get access to your emails.

What: Certain folders would give me the following message: “There are more items in this folder on the server“. There was no link or button (that I could find) to click in the right-click dropdown menu to request to see them or to “sync” the folder to pull these emails down from the server.

Fortunately, I had two colleagues chimed in within minutes to my distress call in our “Things that make you go hmm…” Yammer group, with the following answers:

“The source of truth is always in webmail. Go there. If it ain’t there, it don’t exist.” – Sean

“I’ve had that a couple times where it’s gets wonky. As Sean [suggested], check webmail and if it’s not showing there right click on the folder in Outlook and do a Mark all as Read.” – Alec

I was slightly skeptical (which is ridiculous – I should know better by now), but gave it a try and low and behind, there they were! Check it out:

Outlook 2016 Desktop – Can’t see the emails:

Outlook Webmail – There the emails are!:

Outlook Webmail – Message after archiving all emails on server (via webmail):

Outlook 2016 Desktop – Message after archiving all emails on server (via webmail):

Why did I care about emails from two years ago? Because I wanted to use the “new” Archive button to clean up my Outlook, which is super cluttered with a rabbit hole of folders and sub-folders. Sorting emails into said folders is time consuming, and let’s be honest, I’d rather use that time for anything else. Now, I am not an advocate of deleting data – why bother when you have 50 GB of storage to use? Especially because using the Archive option can save future you from a potential “oh shit” moment.

Check back next week for: a blog post showing off how I used the Archive button to clean up my Outlook.