Running Setup:

Exchange 5.5
BES4 SP1

We seem to have a large number of queued messages. Apart from coverage issues and the devices being turned off and clumping, what are the other reasons why approx 9000 messages are being queued?

Is there any way to force the queue to send?

It seems somewhat odd because only around 100 messages have been expired. Does anyone know what the default time for expired messages are?

Thanks

Messages stay in pending for 7 days then they expire. We have 400 devices and I very often have 8,000 or so pending messages. Reasons are people are out of coverage, devices turned off or people have left the company but I wasn't informed so they are the BES but now device anymore. I periodically go through and purge pending on users that haven't used their devices for over 30 days. The large pending count slows down email scans as the BES has to scan all those mailboes for those messages everytime.

Same here... only about 10% of our devices have coverage during the day (none in building), and we regularly see pending hanging around 7500 or higher. Drops down to 3000-4000 or so in the evenings

It's possible to force the queue to send by restarting the BES router task. What this does is cause the BES servers' SRP to re-authenticate with the NOC (RIM network) and push any transactions/messages that have been tagged for redirection. The problem with that is, each user is only allowed a store of 5 messages on the wireless network (prevent spamming...etc). These messages will stay there for 7 days and then be dropped if the device fails to acknowledge the challenge responses from the BES server.
So the queue will remain for those users whose devices fail to respond for whatever reason - out of coverage, wireless turned off, poor signal strength).

If the affected users are within coverage, and it takes days to receive messages on their devices, then I would look at the other internal network issues that may be related.
It's not unusual to have high pending counts during peak hours on a BES server with several hundred users.