One of the issues that my fellow employees brought to my attention after our Exchange 2010 and BESX 5.0.3 migration was that emails deleted in Outlook weren’t being synced as deleted on their Blackberries anymore. I noticed the issue on my Storm 2 but brushed it off as I started using my personal Samsung Focus as my main mobile work email device.
I doubled checked all the email settings local to my Storm 2 and everything seemed in place so I did some further research and found that this option is disabled by default in a typical BES installation. In addition I came across the following information:
- Only 25 Deletions at a time can be synced, this is apparently a hard limit and no work around is in place. So if more than 25 successive deletes are done, any over 25 will not sync once Hard delete reconciliation is turned on.
- By default BESX will only track 100 emails at a time for a user. If any messages older than the rolling 100 are deleted it won’t be removed from the BB. This can be changed by increasing the maximum emails in the Message state database for each user. This does come at a very small RAM penalty, a formula for which is as follows: (64) * (Messages kept in message state database) * (# of BB users) = Memory In bytes
- RIM has a full breakdown here
Changing the settings in BES was pretty simple and I’m surprised Hard delete reconciliation is not turned on by default. The steps are as follows:
- Login to the web console and expand Servers and Components -> BlackBerry Domain -> Component View -> Email
- When you see YOUR_BES_EMAIL on BES_SERVER_NAME, on YOUR_BES_EMAIL
- on the Messaging tab and then at the bottom of the page the Edit Instance button
- Under the Messaging options section look for Hard deletes reconciliation and change it from False to True
- You may also want to change the Message state database size under the Performance section (max is 1000)
- Full instructions from RIM
When it came to the Message state database size we bumped up the number from 200 to 1000 since the RAM hit for our 50 user environment (~3MB) was so insignificant. I plan to monitor the Memory usage just to be safe over the next few weeks.
