One of the most useful tools that is included with full BlackBerry Enterprise Server and BlackBerry Enterprise Server Express for Exchange only is the static mailbox agent. When something goes wrong with a user or multiple users on the BlackBerry Enterprise Server trying to drill down to the cause of the issue can become very time consuming and frustrating especially if your BlackBerry Enterprise Server houses a lot of users.

All interactions on the BES that deal with things like messaging, calendaring and contact syncs are handled by a messaging agent. The number of messaging agents on the BES will depend on the number of users you have on the BES. A static mailbox agent is a messaging agent that is assigned to an individual or small group of affected users which allows them to have their own resources and allows the BES to create logs for the specific user or users.

In placing a user or users on a static mailbox agent you are greatly narrowing down the amount of information you will be going through to determine the root cause of the problem for the user or group of users. Once you have determined the issue and resolved it you will then be able to switch the user back over to the normal mailbox agent so that those extra server resources are no longer being used.

In order to assign a user or users to a static mailbox agent you can follow the process below based on the version of your BlackBerry Enterprise Server.

Version 4.1
1. Open the BlackBerry Manager
2. Click on the “All Users” tab and then right click the user that is affected.
3. Select the “Edit Properties” at the top of the menu
4. Click the “Advanced” option in the list on the left
5. Change the “Enable Static Mailbox Agent” to “True”
6. Set Mailbox Agent ID to a value between 200 and 399
7. Click the “Apply” Button to save the changes.

Version 5.0

1. Open the BlackBerry Administration Service.
2. Click on “Manage Users”
3. Click on the users Display Name
4. Click the Component Information tab on users’ profile
5. Click Edit user at the bottom of the page.
6. Turn on static mailbox agent should be set to YES.
7. Enter a number between 200 and 399 for Mailbox Agent ID
8. Click Save all.