Outlook for Mac won't download to my inbox

Question

Can't get e-mail to download to Outlook for Mac on my iMac. Works fine with the same settings on my MacBook. Not sure why it's being blocked... Outgoing mail works fine, too.

Answer 1

Hi Dustin.
Other mail clients such as Thunderbird appear to be perfectly capable of downloading mail in circumstances that Mail has trouble with, but I don’t know whether it’s Mail’s fault or there is really something amiss at the server and those other mail clients are just more fault-tolerant.
Sometimes messages left on the server clog up the account there, or Mail chokes on a message it cannot download and that prevents it from downloading the rest as well. What are your Preferences > Accounts > Advanced > Remove copy from server settings for this account?
You may try first removing from the server messages that have already been downloaded. Assuming there is nothing wrong with the MessageUidsAlreadyDownloaded file (or if you’ve already re-created it), you can tell Mail to remove from the server all messages already downloaded by doing Preferences > Accounts > Advanced > Remove now. Alternatively, you may remove specific messages by other means (e.g. webmail or the Account Info window).
If removing already downloaded messages doesn’t work, the next thing to try would be removing messages that Mail hasn’t downloaded yet (you may want to try to download them with another mail client such as Thunderbird first, to avoid losing them). In particular, try removing the first message that Mail appears to be choking on. Actually, if there is a message on the server that Mail has trouble with, you may be able to identify it in the Account Info window. Don’t assume that it’s junk just because Mail doesn’t display it properly in that window, though. Try looking at its contents by other means (e.g. webmail) before removing it from the server.