Dave Loverink reports a problem with iPhones and Exchange Server that results in the disappearance of the Deleted Items folder. He also reported the workaround:
I wanted to pass along this information about a problem with iPhones accessing Exchange Server mailboxes. There is a partial workaround included.
We recently encountered a problem where items in a user's Exchange server-based Deleted Items folder were disappearing. One minute there would be a few hundred items in the folder and the next minute less than 20. We were able to use the Outlook "Recover Deleted Items" tool to retrieve the items. However, anywhere from a few minutes to a few hours later, they would disappear again.
We quickly figured out that this was happening on only two of our accounts - one a PC user with Outlook 2003 and the other a Mac user with Entourage 2004. Without any commonalities in the client software, we started looking at the Exchange server, but were unable to find any problems there. We finally discovered that both accounts were being accessed by the user's iPhone in addition to their desktop email client.
The iPhones were configured to access the Exchange server using IMAP. In the mailbox settings on the iPhone, under Advanced/Mailbox Behaviors, "Deleted Mailbox" was pointed to the user's Deleted Items folder on the Exchange server. Remove Deleted Items was set to Never.
It appears that with this configuration, deleting a message on the iPhone caused the Deleted Items folder on the server to be nearly emptied (it always left a few recent items, somewhere between 5 and 40).
Changing “Remove Deleted Items” to a setting other than Never had no effect on the problem.
Workaround
As a partial workaround, we created a new Exchange server folder called "Deleted From iPhone" and pointed the iPhone Mailbox Behaviors "Deleted Mailbox" to that folder. After this, items stopped disappearing from the Deleted Items folder. With further testing, we confirmed that items in the ?Deleted From iPhone? folder are now disappearing. For now, we're telling users not to delete messages from the iPhone unless they are absolutely sure they won't need them.
Version info: Exchange 2003 on Windows Server 2003 R2 SP2. Both iPhone are running v1.1.2 of that OS. These iPhones came with 1.1.2 out of the box.
Additional reports of this problem can be found at the Apple Discussion Forums.
If you've tried this
if it worked.
