Delete item on BB > random no-sync to Exchange (both hosted)

[zephiris]

Hi all!

I'm Roman, working towards BlackBerry Engineer for a few months now, and i am just hitting a logic barrier where i am starting to get lost. I'm almost sure I am missing something, but I cant figure it out. Never contributed so far, since i want to gain some good indepht knowledge first and now instead of being able to contribute, i have a problem and need help first...

My general troubleshooting skills are excellent, but I am totally failing at this one.

A hosted exchange + hosted blackberry customer having an issue that I am not sure if it is an actual problem or a usage issue:

The issue:

Customer deletes a bunch of messages on the BB, does not check for a few weeks inside his outlook and when he does, afew of the deleted messages are still in outlook. only very few are left, but after a few weeks, they accumulate into quite some bunch and manually cleaning up is quite a task by then. same happens with task objects. not sure if same applies to contacts or other objects, he is concerned about the mails and tasks mainly.

The Accounts are on a Hosting Partner of ours, so i have no direct access to the BES itself, I asked them to check if they see any problems, still need to ask them if they can provide me some logs, but so far they say it all looks normal.

The user works almost only on the blackberry, since he's on the road a lot. The issue he is having shows itself as such, that when he deletes emails or tasks, sometimes some of the deletes he performs on the BB wont synch to exchange for some reason and they get stuck in outlook. some might ask, if he works almost only on the BB, why bother? well, i wont dare asking him that, since it is obvious to me, that whatever the reason, it bothers him as a customer, it should not happen. but it is an unclean thing happening here, and i understand his concern. it would bother me too if i were in his situation... :S

I have searched through various forums and i have found lots of similar problems, but none of the proposed solutions that seemed relevant so far helped. I kind of doubt being the first one seeing this issue, I am starting to think that there is no issue actually and certainly I am missing something, using a wrong pattern, wrong troubleshooting method, i dont know... i'm stuck...

maybe someone can provide some tips on what to look out for? Is the info provided for this problem enough? What specific info do you need additionally?

He dropped by our office and I got to test what he described to me on the phone first. I could not reproduce the problem, but I could see the messages and tasks in outlook that should have been deleted by synchronizing form the BB...

Outlook is using exchange over http, so no PST involved.

The Testing:

- Old messages supposed to be deleted from BB are still visible in Outlook, so i have none to test with on the BB.
- Old tasks supposed to be deleted from BB are still visible in Outlook, there are a few on the BB that i can use to test.

- Sent him a few messages, they spawned synched on bb and exc within a couple of seconds, sometimes up to a few minutes.

- Created a few tasks on BB, synched correctly to EXC.
- Created a few tasks on outlook, synched correctly to BB.

- Deleted a newly sent message on the BB, it syncs within a moment, sometimes up to a few minutes.
- Deleted a newly sent message on outlook, it syncs within a moment, sometimes up to a few minutes.

- Deleted a newly created task on the BB, it syncs within a moment, sometimes up to a few minutes.
- Deleted a newly created task on outlook, it syncs within a moment, sometimes up to a few minutes.

- Deleted an old task in Outlook, it did not delete sync to the BB, old task still in BB.
- Deleted an old task in the BB, same as above, no luck.

Everything looks normal for newly created elements. The old elements seemed to be the actual problem, so I instructed him to manually delete those in exchange for now.

- Customer manually cleans up outlook to mach the BB.
- Resent service books.
- Customer instructed to observe and give feedback if it happens again/still.

Past monday the customer writes that the problem still happens. I am still looking for possible solutions, but since I cant find this specific case anywhere, I wonder if I am totally missing something so trivial, that it may have not even spawned as a problem in the community?!?!

First i thought he has to be doing something wrong. I asked him to show me exactly how he performs the manual cleanup. He just selects the element, presses delete key then enter key at the prompt, asking to delete on BB+Box by default, which is correct so far. Also using the other methods known, using the menu and such, problem remains the same. some random emails are not deleted right from outlook and at the end of the month he gets to clean up his outlook box for hours because of this...

Now, If there really is no actual problem, but the user is doing something wrong, I would not know what that is, and what to tell him about it... I cant do troubleshooting a lot on this, because the customer is always on the road... i am thinking of giving him a replacement unit for the time being, and check whats wrong with the current one. Thats the only thing left to do, from that point on, if that doesnt help, I am lost in a loop...

I will do that still, but if someone knows already what the problem might be...

please, help!

cheers!
roman

ps: sorry for the messy description, but I'm starting to loose my nerves here... it seemed an easy problem to solve at first, but apparently I was wrong...

[RTakacs]

No point giving him a replacement while investigating as it will give him the same problem.
The issue is linked to his BES settings (most likely)
Check the the provider that "hard delete reconciliation" is enabled.
Make sure the user NEVER "shift" deletes anything.
Is every folder sync'd/re-directed?

[zephiris]

Hi all!

Thanks RTakacs.

I had already tried all that and nothing helped. A week later my customer still complains. Same issue happened, after we manually cleaned up stuff.

A friend of mine working at another company tells me that he's seen this issue once, and this is what he told me:

The deletion of objects is considered a last priority. That is why the delete commands from the BlackBerry will be queued (in a batch) and runs every 20 minutes or 100 commands, whichever comes first. However, when more than 25 commands per batch are processed, only the first 25 are processed, the rest is lost. This is a limitation of MS Exchange, which can only process up to 25 commands per batch. This would be solved if we could decrease the intervals on the BlackBerry server, such as 1 min to reduce the number of objects per batch to drop below 25. Here again, however, a limitation of the BlackBerry server, which can not be changed.

That change would cause, that when the user deletes a lot of messages, he should not reach more than 25 deleted messages per minute, which seems realistic, instead of trying avoiding to delete more than 25 messages every 20 minutes.

After days and days of researching with empty hands, I decided to tell the User to live with it, to clean his mailbox manually once in a while, and to avoid to do big batch deletes...

maybe someone can tell me "that's totally wrong" or "that's right" or "thats partially right" ?

cheers!
roman