Category Technical Blackberry
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As you know I am a big fan of Blackberry - I have had a 7100t, an 8700g, and now an 8100t (Pearl). Great smartphones, and I am especially fond of my Pearl. However, I have been having a problem lately with my Pearl, and it has caused me no end of grief - until now, when I found a solution! Since I finally figured out how to fix my problem, I thought I would share with all of you, just in case you're experiencing similar problems.

The Problem
I was using my Pearl, quite happily, when all-of-a-sudden it would not let me delete my emails anymore from the device. I could read them, but I could not delete them - not individually, and not using "Delete Prior". They would just stay in my inbox, taunting me. I also found that if I did not read the emails, I could delete them; but once I had read them, they stayed their forever, like deadbeat relatives in your home. Bastards.

One other weird symptom - and I didn't notice this for a long time - the icon to the left of the email changed from a little "mail" icon (like an envelope - open for read, closed for unread) to a "folder" icon (yellow for unread, blue for read). The bad thing is that these icons are small, and unless you're looking for this difference you might not even notice it. I found that this is the telltale symptom for this problem.

OK, now I know what the problem is - what causes it?

The Cause
I finally realized what the cause was when it happened the last time to me. I had done nothing different in my environment, but I found that I had this problem reoccur for no apparent reason. Upon further investigation I found that my email database design had been updated by our administrators overnight, and they hadn't told anyone - AH HA!!

I did some further testing, and sure enough - whenever I had upgraded the design of my mail database, the problem happened. No idea why upgrading the mail database design causes this problem, but at least I know what action causes it.

Now the question is - short of wiping and reloading my Pearl (which was my previous solution - and I hated it), how can I fix this problem?

The Solution
The solution is really a two-part solution - but (so far) it seems to work every time this problem occurs.

First, you need to go into your Blackberry Desktop Manager (BBDM), and go to Backup and Restore, then click Advanced, then select Messages in the right pane (see below).



Once you have selected Messages, click the Clear button, then Close. Go ahead and close out of Backup and Restore, close BBDM, and disconnect your Blackberry.

Second, you need to go into your Blackberry Email Options, then go into Email Reconciliation. Turn off Wirless Reconcile, close out. Let it sit for 30 seconds. Then go back into Email Reconciliation, and turn Wireless Reconcile back on, close out.

That's it! That should fix your emails so that all future emails can be deleted. You can verify that this fix worked because the little icons will be back to envelope icons, not folder icons - oh, and you can delete them again.

Hopefully this will help someone else avoid the hair-pulling I went through when this problem would surface. It also lets you know when the problem occurs so you can be ready for it and can fix it right after you upgrade your mail database design.

BTW, I am going to share this with the Blackberry folks at RIM so that they can look into it and (hopefully) fix it so this problem doesn't occur to begin with.

Any other Blackberry fixes we should know about? Please share them here!

UPDATE: It turns out that there is a Blackberry KBase article on this very problem - KB11860. It basically says what I say here, except that it indicates you must be running Blackberry Enterprise Server 4.1 Service Pack 3 Hotfix 1 or later for the workaround above to work. (Thanks to John Wargo of RIM for letting me know that a KBase article exists about this!)

Rock
**The main accomplishment of almost all organized protests is to annoy people who are not in them.