Why is there a need to schedule the MailboxDeleteService Business Process in IBM Sterling B2B Integrator ?

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Most of the IBM Sterling B2B Integrator(SBI) clients would definitely use Mailboxes extensively for the purpose of Sending/Receiving messages to their partners. A message can enter the mailbox either through the MailboxAddService in a Business Process or using a Protocol like FTP/SFTP/CD etc. When it reaches the mailbox it gets a Message ID and at a later point of time when the Schedule_IndexBusinessProcessService runs, the message will gain a Lifespan. By Default the Lifespan of a Mailbox message would be 10 years and therefore irrespective of the lifespan set for the document and the Business Process in the Archive Manager, the message in the mailbox gains a 10 year lifespan. If the message is associated with a BP, then the BP also gains a 10 year Life span.

When the Schedule_BackupService runs, it would archive this message.But when the Schedule_PurgeService runs, it would not remove this mailbox message from the system because it has a 10 years Lifespan. Therefore the BP and the mailbox message remains in the system for 10 years. This means as the number of transactions increases , more number of messages gets accumulated in the mailbox and this would in turn use up the space in the Database/Filesystem and might result in the DB Growth Issues.

In order to overcome such issues, it is very important to schedule a BP containing a MailboxDeleteService at particular intervals so that the messages in the mailbox are deleted periodically.After the MailboxDeleteService acts on a particular message, it updates the Workflow ID associated with the message in the BPMV_REIDX table which makes it eligible for being re-indexed. When the Schedule_IndexBusinessProcessService runs again, it would reset the lifespan for the message ID along with Workflow ID, to the lifespan configured in the Archive Manager.

Note : Deleting the mailbox message from a mailbox will not delete the document from the system, but it simply deletes the link to the document on the mailbox. The deletion of the document associated with the message and business process will actually be taken care by the regular system clean up processes (index/archive/purge).