I ran into this problem recently and was able to resolve it. In case someone needs help in the future....
Outlook is finding a corrupt e-mail on AOL's server, cannot accept it and then times out. The hard part is finding the e-mail, possibly amongst thousands like my client had. Here's the best way I could think of to track down the culprit:
Get Outlook on another PC with a clean, empty profile set up for the AOL account in question. As mail is retrieved for the first time, pay close attention to the dates. Because it is IMAP and not POP3 you don't need to worry about removing mail from AOL's server that the Outlook we're trying to fix is going to miss. In my case there were 3,000 items in this person's Inbox. After about half way through the retrieval process Outlook produced the error. You have to pay attention during the first send/receive in the clean Outlook profile because you'll then know the date of the corrupt e-mail (
at the time the error pops up, look at the date of the incoming messages!). When you know the approximate date you can close Outlook.
You need to know this date because you now have to login to the AOL account at
http://webmail.aol.com, go to that date and delete the e-mail(s). Since the error popped up when retrieving e-mail that was nearly two years old and no longer important, I deleted a week's worth of messages from the AOL Webmail Inbox, deleted them from the Webmail Deleted Items folder, and the problem was solved.
Opened Outlook,
no more errors.
I hope this information can help someone down the road!