My understanding is that by default, BES looks into Deleted Items to find out what should be removed from Blackberry, if I enable this hard delete feature, does it mean it will also delete mail from the Blackberry even if I empty Deleted Items right away?

Are there any concerns I should be aware of? Here's the article I found:

View Document

Thanks for your information.

If you have Hard Delete reconciliation enabled, BES will basically remove any message from the handheld that no longer appears in the Inbox or any redirected folder.
The message doesn't need to be in the Deleted Items folder at all in order for BES to reconcile the delete to the handheld.

Having it enabled makes the devices mimic mail client more closely.
It ended alot of questions here once enabled.

If you delete from either its gone from both.

We have a number of user wanted to be able to delete messages on the phone, but retain everything in Inbox. If I enable this, will it delete everything too in Inbox for everyone regardless of settings?

No, not at all.

When deleting from the handheld, you have the following options:
Handheld Only
Mailbox & Handheld
Prompt (will allow you to choose one of the above every time you delete something)

Thank you, so the client settings will still be respected regardless of this "hard delete" setting on the server. This is great as I've been telling people to sync deleted items to BB, not to empty the bin for a day!

It begs the question, what's the advantage of NOT using hard deletes?

Why read and delete them twice?
Counter productive if you ask me.

The Pros of Hard Delete:
- Makes the BB better mirror the content of Outlook, even if user has 'Delete On' set to 'Handheld' in his Email Reconciliation settings.
- No more 'orphaned messages' on the BB when users move emails from Exchange mail store to a personal mail store.


The Cons of Hard Delete:
- None (I can't think of any.)

I believe there is a small job that runs nightly to handle this, so granted, this job may chew up some CPU resource on your BES during its run. (I would guess most BES's won't even feel it.)

It doesn't use up any more disk in your Blackberry Config database because the BES is already maintaining a Message State database to track deleted / filed emails. In other words, the BES will know that the Outlook side and the BB side are not totally in sync; the question becomes whether you want to do anything about it.

If your users are accustomed to this feature being Disabled (the default behavior), and you go Enable it, you should tell your Users you are making this change. Some users *like* having old emails on BB, even if they are not in Outlook. They'll notice.

CONS of Hard Deletes:

1) It is a change from how it USED to be. Any change can be difficult to some organizations
2) Hard Deletes have limited functionality and rely on a cache that the BES builds which is reset / flushed under the following circumstances:

* Either of the BlackBerry Enterprise Server or BlackBerry Profesional Software are restarted.
* The BlackBerry smartphone user is moved to another BlackBerry Enterprise Server or BlackBerry Professional Software.
* The BlackBerry smartphone user's mailbox is moved to another Microsoft Exchange Server.
* The BlackBerry Enterprise Server administrator sends a Reload User command from BlackBerry Manager.

The fact that it isn't 100% reliable makes is a CON because it then provides an irregular result. In some cases less functionality (but reliable) is better than more (potentially irregular) functionality.

Or tell the user to get over it.

BOFH for the win on this issue.

Last time I checked server admins weren't the ones setting policy in an enterprise ...

Maybe but there is only one here and it seems to do the trick for now.
But now i have a bit more info on the subject and might let the user choose or knot.