[Omnitech]

Can someone tell me the difference between imap and active sync?

Why don't you take a look at the thread below, and if it doesn't answer your questions I'll be glad to do so here or over on that thread.

http://forums.crackberry.com/blackbe...yncing-777774/

[johnnyuk]

* 'Delete on Handheld' could just hide an email from view *

I agree about that and I've had discussions with people here about that before.

On the one hand, it could be a useful feature. On the other hand, it could be a confusing feature. Because whenever you have a "syncing" system, the baseline assumption is that all endpoints are in sync. If you start selectively hiding things on various endpoints, it could get confusing trying to keep track of what actually exists and what doesn't exist on the server.

Was it confusing being able to 'Delete on Handheld' for the last decade in BBOS devices? Not in my experience as a BESAdmin for that whole time. My users understood the concept immediately and most preferred or to work that way. They could even clear down the emails on the Blackberry at the end of the working day using Delete Prior knowing their mailbox kept a copy of all those emails for later.

'Delete on Handheld' was the default setting for BBOS devices activated on BES. You had to manually change the setting on the device if you wanted it to work differently. As it happens it's taking a lot of explaining during my Z10/Q10 roll out right now to get the message across that no matter what if you delete on the device it will delete from the mailbox.

I don't personally have any problem with Active Sync always being in sync and always having to see the result of that on the device and mailbox but 'Delete on Handheld' was never confusing before.


Posted via CB10

[phillyd2]

I've been told my Blackberry Technical Support that the option to delete "on mailbox & handhled" and "on handheld" will be coming shortly to Z10 in a software upgrade. Below is the email I received from Blackberry:

Subject: RE: BlackBerry INC000026289414 | BB Z 10, FE- Ability to either delete an Email message 'on handheld' or on 'On Mailbox & Handheld''

Hello
As mentioned on our interaction on the phone, there will be an option to delete on handheld only in a new OS update for the device. As to when that will be released, there is no time frame set or specified. Development of this feature has been accepted and it has been noted that others have been effected as well, however it may take some time for the development team to implement it.

In regards to this information, do you have any further questions or concerns on this ticket that I may assist you with at this time? I will follow up on this case on Monday as well.

Thank you again for contacting us. Have a great day.

Sincerely,
BlackBerry Technical Support
BlackBerry

I assume there are no mods here to help reduce trolling so let me request that you guys please start another thread to discuss how YOUR way is best as most of us don't care and you guys have really crapped this thread. As a result we now have 100's of meaningless 'mine is bigger than yours' posts. Terrible!

The above quoted post is the only useful one so far. Any updates on this?

[Omnitech]

* 'Delete on Handheld' could just hide an email from view *



Was it confusing being able to 'Delete on Handheld' for the last decade in BBOS devices? Not in my experience as a BESAdmin for that whole time. My users understood the concept immediately and most preferred or to work that way. They could even clear down the emails on the Blackberry at the end of the working day using Delete Prior knowing their mailbox kept a copy of all those emails for later.

'Delete on Handheld' was the default setting for BBOS devices activated on BES. You had to manually change the setting on the device if you wanted it to work differently. As it happens it's taking a lot of explaining during my Z10/Q10 roll out right now to get the message across that no matter what if you delete on the device it will delete from the mailbox.

Correct me if I am wrong, but I would surmise that back in the days before Blackberry supported native EAS and so on, it was less common for users to have 3 or 4 different mobile or syncing devices connected to the same BES email account, their Blackberry and perhaps laptop were probably the only portable devices that most of those users had connected to that mail system, since BES was a sort of walled-garden up until recently.

Then there's the issue of people on the now-dominant platforms expecting a modern Blackberry device to act like their other devices. As much as you or I might appreciate some of the advantages of some of the ways Blackberry traditionally handled email, I don't think Blackberry is in a position today to freely impose their particular operational quirks on the world of potential customers outside of Blackberry's small userbase, unless someday they regain the kind of market dominance they once had. That certainly isn't today's reality.

I'm a die-hard Opera browser user, and despite the fact that Opera was the first to bring features like extensive keyboard shortcuts to their browser many years ago, over the years they repeatedly changed those shortcuts to match how the dominant browsers had mapped them - at great inconvenience to their traditional userbase who had gotten Opera's keyboard commands mentally entrenched - simply because they couldn't fight the tide and run the risk of alienating everyone in the future who might try their product and then drop it in disgust because it was "operationally quirky".

I also have a long personal shortlist of email functionality that I'd love to see on Blackberry 10 that not only never existed in previous Blackberry email clients, but probably hasn't been implemented in any native smartphone email client yet, but I think it's high time to do so. "Hide from view without filing" is a potential candidate for that list, but way down near the bottom of it.

[torpesco]

Correct me if I am wrong, but I would surmise that back in the days before Blackberry supported native EAS and so on, it was less common for users to have 3 or 4 different mobile or syncing devices connected to the same BES email account, their Blackberry and perhaps laptop were probably the only portable devices that most of those users had connected to that mail system, since BES was a sort of walled-garden up until recently.

Then there's the issue of people on the now-dominant platforms expecting a modern Blackberry device to act like their other devices. As much as you or I might appreciate some of the advantages of some of the ways Blackberry traditionally handled email, I don't think Blackberry is in a position today to freely impose their particular operational quirks on the world of potential customers outside of Blackberry's small userbase, unless someday they regain the kind of market dominance they once had. That certainly isn't today's reality.

I'm a die-hard Opera browser user, and despite the fact that Opera was the first to bring features like extensive keyboard shortcuts to their browser many years ago, over the years they repeatedly changed those shortcuts to match how the dominant browsers had mapped them - at great inconvenience to their traditional userbase who had gotten Opera's keyboard commands mentally entrenched - simply because they couldn't fight the tide and run the risk of alienating everyone in the future who might try their product and then drop it in disgust because it was "operationally quirky".

I also have a long personal shortlist of email functionality that I'd love to see on Blackberry 10 that not only never existed in previous Blackberry email clients, but probably hasn't been implemented in any native smartphone email client yet, but I think it's high time to do so. "Hide from view without filing" is a potential candidate for that list, but way down near the bottom of it.

I still disagree that too many users would find it confusing. We have no metrics for usability and you also didn?t reference any for how many devices people are using to access their email on average.

I'd be surprised to see the option as default behaviour anyway, so I would surmise that only those that know what it does would give it a shot.

Anyway, someone posted that the feature is at least on BlackBerry's radar.

At least with Opera's hot key changes, the features were still there. Really off topic: I miss Opera sometimes, though I've been mostly happy with Chrome. Maybe with webkit I'll give it a try again (it was too many pages not rendering properly that took me away - that and the tab bar moved up over the window title bar).

Posted via CB10

[Bonsaibo]

I think something that could possibly lead to some level of confusion, and some level of messed up email accounts, by re-implementing the "delete on" options, is the multiple ways the various email providers handle email reconciliation. Since there is no standard, there will be some users that end up with some multiple steps trying to keep all their email and folders where and how they want it. This burden probably increases where there are multiple email providers being utilized by a user, and even more so where a single device is used for personal and corporate email. This doesn't necessarily mean these "delete on" options can't be resurrected. It probably needs to be a user selected option, rather than an across the board method.

By making it an option, like on the old bbos, I think this might lead to the broadest spectrum of "happy users."

[Richard Buckley]

To really understand this issue you need to go back to the early days of BlackBerry mail when Delete on Device was the only option. Email was essentially (I am really over simplifying here and I'll only deal with BIS for now) copied to the device by the BIS server. You could do what ever you wanted to the email and nothing was reflected on the original source (POP3 or IMAP usually) server. Then BIS added delete syncing (maybe read syncing worked for some servers too, I never saw that). It was made an option, which was the right thing to do. But the important point is that there was the BIS server between the hand held and the mail server that could save any inconsistencies between the two views of the mailbox the user wanted. The BIS server is now gone. Any inconsistencies you now want to have between the server view of the mailbox and the BB view of the mailbox has to be maintained on the BB. Think about that for a while while your device is on and off the network for various reasons, and while several desktops, a laptop, tablet and web-mail system all muck about with the mailbox.

I don't have a BES10 system but if I understand correctly the part of the BES that handles mail (and other things) is gone, replaced by Active Sync. Many people asked for this loud and long. Now we have it, but Active Sync, like IMAP and to a lesser extent POP3 are designed to try to keep all the versions of one mail box in sync -- the same. You can say you want one special mail box to be different, and I can agree that would be a nice feature given the use cases, but doing so will by necessity break the protocols. I'm sure it can be done, but I predict there will be a roaring train wreck of bugs while the BlackBerry developers figure out how to do this with all the combinations and permutations that we uses are creative enough to come up with.

[southlander]

Please stop trying to sell inferior solutions as superior, and telling people to change the way they operate to a longer, more laborious method, while asking them to accept that it is 'better' in some way.

Valid point. But folks should also stop buying BlackBerry 10 phones thinking they can badger BlackBerry into making them work like traditional BlackBerry phones in every respect. That ain't happening.

Posted via BlackBerry 10

[southlander]

Valid point. But folks should also stop buying BlackBerry 10 phones knowing they are different but thinking they can badger BlackBerry into making them work like traditional BlackBerry phones in every respect. That ain't happening.

Posted via BlackBerry 10

Posted via BlackBerry 10

[southlander]

Dupe sorry.

Posted via BlackBerry 10

[Omnitech]

I think something that could possibly lead to some level of confusion, and some level of messed up email accounts, by re-implementing the "delete on" options, is the multiple ways the various email providers handle email reconciliation. Since there is no standard, there will be some users that end up with some multiple steps trying to keep all their email and folders where and how they want it. This burden probably increases where there are multiple email providers being utilized by a user, and even more so where a single device is used for personal and corporate email. This doesn't necessarily mean these "delete on" options can't be resurrected. It probably needs to be a user selected option, rather than an across the board method.

So when you say "reconciliation", do you mean the distinction between when a user performs an action on a particular device (create, delete, move, etc), when that action gets synced to the server or other devices?

Because I'd guess the main confusion for most people there is that an IMAP system using IMAP IDLE (and its related/enhanced variants - ie "push" features) has a disparity between when a user is notified of new messages, versus when a particular client syncs changes other than new message notification/appearance.

So you've got an existing inbox that has 100 messages in it, and you delete 5. Then you get a push new mail notification for 2 new messages. Temporarily, it tells you the inbox now has 102 messages in it, although in fact it actually has 5 pending deletions for a total of 97 messages, but those deletions aren't going to be synced until the next sync period, which might be 10-15 minutes from now.

Whereas if I'm not mistaken, Exchange ActiveSync does that "reconciliation" at the same time it does a (push) new mail notification, or proactively when you make a change on the client.

Is there some other aspect of "reconciliation" you're referring to? (I'm not referring to POP3 here, which is a whole other kettle of fish, and the area that Blackberry historically probably differed most from other clients due to the things they did with BIS to optimize POP3 back when it was much more prevalent than it is today.)

[johnnyuk]

Correct me if I am wrong, but I would surmise that back in the days before Blackberry supported native EAS and so on, it was less common for users to have 3 or 4 different mobile or syncing devices connected to the same BES email account, their Blackberry and perhaps laptop were probably the only portable devices that most of those users had connected to that mail system, since BES was a sort of walled-garden up until recently.

Yep, true, there are many more places a user's mailbox could be viewable from or synced with nowadays but there is still only one mailbox on the mail server. If in doubt either browse to the corporate Web Mail or load the corporate mail client on a PC or laptop that's connects directly to the mail server and see what emails you really have. All my users are more than capable of managing that, maybe I'm just lucky.

Anyway, I would never advocate a "Delete on Handheld" function that just hides the email from view on the device as being the default behavior when deleting, but as an optional setting it would have its uses as it always did. It was something uniquely BlackBerry in BBOS, it could be a Unique Selling Point of BB10 one day.

Posted via CB10

[johnnyuk]

I don't have a BES10 system but if I understand correctly the part of the BES that handles mail (and other things) is gone, replaced by Active Sync. Many people asked for this loud and long. Now we have it, but Active Sync, like IMAP and to a lesser extent POP3 are designed to try to keep all the versions of one mail box in sync -- the same. You can say you want one special mail box to be different, and I can agree that would be a nice feature given the use cases, but doing so will by necessity break the protocols.

Not the way I suggested where "Delete on Handheld" just hides the message from the user's view and subtracts it from any displayed message count totals while actually leaving the message in the message database on the device right where it was. What Active Sync and IMAP don't know about can't hurt them.


Posted via CB10

[Richard Buckley]

Not the way I suggested where "Delete on Handheld" just hides the message from the user's view and subtracts it from any displayed message count totals while actually leaving the message in the message database on the device right where it was. What Active Sync and IMAP don't know about can't hurt them.


Posted via CB10

Great! Let everyone know when you have it written.

[johnnyuk]

Great! Let everyone know when you have it written.

Think I'll leave that bit to BlackBerry lol

I hear it's on their radar so I'll just wait for it.

Posted via CB10

[Bonsaibo]

So when you say "reconciliation", do you mean the distinction between when a user performs an action on a particular device (create, delete, move, etc), when that action gets synced to the server or other devices?

Because I'd guess the main confusion for most people there is that an IMAP system using IMAP IDLE (and its related/enhanced variants - ie "push" features) has a disparity between when a user is notified of new messages, versus when a particular client syncs changes other than new message notification/appearance.

So you've got an existing inbox that has 100 messages in it, and you delete 5. Then you get a push new mail notification for 2 new messages. Temporarily, it tells you the inbox now has 102 messages in it, although in fact it actually has 5 pending deletions for a total of 97 messages, but those deletions aren't going to be synced until the next sync period, which might be 10-15 minutes from now.

Whereas if I'm not mistaken, Exchange ActiveSync does that "reconciliation" at the same time it does a (push) new mail notification, or proactively when you make a change on the client.

Is there some other aspect of "reconciliation" you're referring to? (I'm not referring to POP3 here, which is a whole other kettle of fish, and the area that Blackberry historically probably differed most from other clients due to the things they did with BIS to optimize POP3 back when it was much more prevalent than it is today.)

I guess my easiest answer should be "exactly!" Just think of how we're all trying to define all these terms, on all these systems, given all these different protocols, and then attempting to meet everyone's needs. I'm just afraid of one big cluster ckuf that could result from these "delete on" options.

[HotFix]

Think I'll leave that bit to BlackBerry lol

I hear it's on their radar so I'll just wait for it.

Posted via CB10

Where did you hear this?

Posted via CB10

[Omnitech]

Where did you hear this?

I believe I've seen this quoted here as well. Some sort of tweet or BBM post from a member of Blackberry management or something.
Maybe I was just remembering a dream...

BTW - a concise response of mine from another thread about the downside of "hiding" in a syncing email system:

I've proposed pretty much exactly that in discussions here before. But I ultimately came to the conclusion that it's better to just file a message in a synced folder than "hide" it. For example, what happens when a "hidden" message on device 2, is deleted on device 3? If it's deleted, then "hide" doesn't do what you think it does when you make that choice on device 2, which leads to confusion/chaos. If it's NOT deleted, then in actuality you're not actually hiding it, you're saving it, which brings us back to the beginning again.

[Richard Buckley]

BTW - a concise response of mine from another thread about the downside of "hiding" in a syncing email system:
...

Your reason is why I believe the implementation path to any kind os solution is going to create a list of bugs that will be very difficult to track down.

[johnnyuk]

Where did you hear this?

Posted via CB10

In the CrackBerry forums....which are always right.....hmm

Posted via CB10

[phillyd2]

Where did you hear this?

Posted via CB10

Post 328 quotes the message from BB but I have not seen any updates yet.

[Omnitech]

Post 328 quotes the message from BB but I have not seen any updates yet.

And how did I miss that...

But I do vaguely recall hearing that elsewhere as well.

[New_z10_going_back_to_the_store]

After purchasing a brand new z10 and getting it set up, I was startled to see emails that hadn't yet been received by my PC, but which the z10 had downloaded from the server, gone and irretrievable after deletion from the z10. I really don't care about all the trollers on this forum who want to preach about how others should use their phones, but don't understand the context and how others' needs are different. For me, having a bberry that deletes emails that I wanted to deal with on my pc is a showstopper. It makes the device unusable. Full stop. There is no satisfactory workaround (and from reading many others' comments, I suspect that is true for the majority of posters here).

It is beyond belief that Blackberry could make a decision that affects so many people negatively (extremely negatively) when not making this change (i.e. leaving it alone) wouldn't have affected anyone. It's like they don't understand how people use their equipment. No one advised me of this change at Verizon (and it is a huge change that you'd think they'd say something about), there is no documentation of it, and the only way to find out any of this is to have the problem, go searching for a solution (i.e. am I missing some magical missing setting?), and find this thread on a forum.

Blackberry, you just lost another user, probably permanently, because of one insanely stupid change. I was actually feeling good about the design and functionality of the z10 thinking maybe Blackberry had a real chance at stabilizing and recovering and regaining some lost market share. Now I'm pretty certain that they will alienate a huge percentage of their remaining fans who are shocked to discover needed emails disappearing in the ether because some techie thought this was a smart thing to do. I hate the thought of having to use an old machine that is rapidly aging out of usefulness, so I'll probably just switch to a vendor that I know will still be around in a year.

Blackberry, you get a huge raspberry for this idiotic move.

[Jerry A]

I can totally see being frustrated by BlackBerry switching to standard POP3 support. But what do you hope to accomplish by switching to another platform where the behavior will be the same?

[tgzgeorge]

its how active sync works guys. same on iphone

Posted via CB10

You're on exchange, it doesn't work when you're not. Get a clue

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