Thank you Ben for your opinion.

Error or not. I beg to differ. I don't see this as an normal/expected behavior and when you look at other products like Outlook etc. folder and their content ends up in trash. I would say that my users are quite average and still they tend to delete folders by mistake now and then no matter what pop-up they get on their screen. When doing so It's my personal opinion that It's not acceptable that they irreversibly loose all their data stored when doing so (Normally data in folders are put in folder because they want to store them and because they are important to the user, therefore it's extra painful if this would happen when/if moved to the cloud).

No I don't want more customizations than absolutely necessary. Thank you for the suggestion though. All customizations needs to be validated when moving to the cloud.

Cloud or not. That is what I'm evaluating now. I'm fully aware of pros and cons, and even if you let someone else handle your daily routines that's not necessarily equal to loosing control.

If anyone else has some tips and tricks to the problem/error described then I'd really appreciated it!

Thank you!

Rasmus

...and I'd suspect that may very contribute to the issue that Rasmus is seeing.

Having been an admin for quite a number of years, I've had conversations ('argued') with users re: the deletion of emails or folders, ie - 'delete means delete', and overall I'd like to agree with you. But to be fair to the users, ever since the Eclipse client was released, Notes has suffered from multiple issues where the document / folder / button that you THINK is highlighted is in fact NOT the item that is highlighted. Once you hit the delete key, the wrong item gets deleted - only to be noticed much later.

I first noticed this behavior in 8.0.1 and it's still there in 9.0.1FP2. I've opened a number of PMRs but have yet to notice any fixes.

Here is one example thread -> http://www-10.lotus.com/ldd/ndseforum.nsf/xpTopicThread.xsp?documentId=649B03735425EF3985257D710052881E , but there are quite a few both in the Notes 8 forum as well as here.

Thank you Ben for your input and testing. And yes we still disagree if it's an error or not. But you have clearly understood my problem anyway (even when bending the meaning of words) so that is great!

Now back to the problem:

So our test's combined shows that deleted folders containing mails are indeed irreversibly deleted when in SmartCloud. AND the content of the folders are not deleted even if they are in a folder that the user have actively chosen to delete (not a normal behavior)! So to not mix up SmartCloud users with on-premises:

When IBM SmartCloud users delete a folder:

1. The user irreversibly loses the folder structure. Can't be restored.

2. The user THINKS the e-mails and the folders are gone. But the e-mails are actually still stored under all documents.

3. The mail db are now filled with what might be tens of thousands of unstructured e-mails that the user most likely wanted to delete.

3.1 If the user accidentally deleted the folders it's still more or less impossible to sort back into a identical folder structure.

And for on-premises server users:

1. The user loses the folder structure. It can however be restored from a domino server backup.

2. The user THINKS the e-mails are gone. But they are actually still there under all documents.

3. All documents are now filled with what might be thousands of unstructured e-mails. That potentially could be duplicated when restoring the folder structure (depending on type of restore).

- If this is not an error and the deletion of folders are truly "working as designed" then I would like to hear the motivation from the designer at IBM explaining the logic behind. ;-)

Thanks again!

Rasmus

New PMR created and added as an enhancement request to the already registered:

Registered version R6        - SPR # HIS6B2K22, "Deleting a mail folder does not delete the contents of the folder",
Registered version R7,8,9 - SPR # KSAA7MFEQW, "Enhancement, When deleting folder, user wants the new feature to delete all document in Folder."

I must say It's with an impressive speed these enhancement requests are processed at IBM. Version 6 was released more than a decade ago back in 2003!

A second PMR regarding the lack of folder backup's in IBM Connections / SmartCloud has also been registered. Will get back with more info on that.

/R

Well for the Notes client there is now the INI setting -  DisableDelKeyForNavigator

<sarcasm>

It'd be nice if someday IBM would look into maintaining an on-line Notes.ini reference. It seems to me that would be a handy place to look for all my notes.ini needs.

</sarcasm>

I can't find 'DisableDelKeyForNavigator' in IBM support pages, either.

What does it do?

To which version(s) of the client is it applicable?

Thanks!

I actually did find a little more info yesterday after I posted, and of course had to test to find the real answer, and had not had the chance to post my findings yet.

In 9.0.1FP3, 'DisableDelKeyForNavigator=1' seems to allow mail to be deleted, but not the folder, which is exactly what I as an admin would want. 

However, I was hoping to find documented the EXACT intent of the parameter, because I'd hate to push it out to all my users, and find that in some versions of Notes that it prevents the deletion of mail from the inbox. Once pushed out, you can't remove notes.ini parms thru Policy (although one could set the parm to '0').

Re: your links - I could NOT find anything on 'DisableDelKeyForNavigator' here;

http://www-10.lotus.com/ldd/dominowiki.nsf/xpViewCategories.xsp?lookupName=Notes.ini%20File  - No results match the search query submitted.

or here:

http://www-10.lotus.com/ldd/fixlist.nsf/Notes.ini?OpenView   - No Documents Found for Query

or here:

http://www.lntoolbox.com/en/notesini-reference/bycategory.html  - Total: 0 results found.

Nor did I find it at the IBM support portal.

However, for the benefit of other users, I did find these:

http://www.pmooney.net/dload/ls14/BP101AdminblastFinal.pdf

http://www.idonotes.com/IdoNotes/idonotes.nsf/dx/ibm-notes-9-stops-user-from-deleting-folders-by-accident.htm

http://www.slideshare.net/MatNewman/bp104-have-it-your-way-amd-make-it-work-for-you

It would be nice, though, to find an official IBM document on this (or many other) subject(s).

It really should be up to IBM to update and maintain the list. They are the ones creating them, they know (or should know) what the intent is, and how it should work. I guess my real beef is, that IBM removed the Notes.ini parms section from the release Notes, and made a big deal that it was easier to maintain them all in one location on the web.

I guess they found that it was easier not to maintain them at all.

And, no, sorry, it wasn't clear! I knew you were agreeing overall, but thought you had found it while I missed it! I had previously searched two out of three of the links that you posted, and hadn't found it - I was assuming maybe I was just needing newer bifocals.

This was always my Notes.ini go to, other than the Release Notes ->  http://www.drcc.com/ref/notesini.nsf/all - back before IBM created theirs. However, I don't know how updated this is, either.

And, for what it's worth, every chance I get to mention the lack of a Notes.INI reference on an IBM survey, I take it!

;-)

I'd like to point out that one primary reason the "remove folder" function works differently than, say, Outlook is that Outlook doesn't allow messages to exist in more than one folder.  Notes does.  So it would be illogical and confusing to have a message that exists in multiple folders disappear from your mail when you remove just one of the folders that it exists in.

I teach my users the ability to organize mail in multiple folders as well as the fact that removing folders isn't "deleting" them and won't actually delete the contents.  I also have added a View to the default template that shows all messages that are not in any folder.

The fix isn't to get the developers to dumb down Notes to make it work like Outlook (or whatever).  One idea: make the "delete" key not work at all on folders so that the users must right-click on them and select "Remove".  And the word "Remove" is not "delete", as already pointed out.

Another idea:  when using the delete key against a folder have a dialog box appear  that says:

     O Delete folder and its contents.
     O Remove folder only and retain contents in All Documents view.

Or something like that.

That way the advanced functionality could be retained but would give the option of deleting the folder contents along with the folder when desired.