The SmartCloud administration panel has a setting for how long deleted messages are in the trash.  From the administration screen, in the left navigation click on IBM SmartCloud Notes, Click Account Settings…

Click Email Management.

This setting overrides the setting in the database properties – advanced tab – soft deletions.

However…

If your users are using Managed Mail Replicas (MMR), then they have a local replica and the Notes client will still process soft deletions on that local replica according to the database setting.  So if the database setting is set shorter than what you have in the SmartCloud admin settings, the trash will be emptied locally and then replicated to the server and it will appear as though the server setting isn’t working.

Normally the administrator could change this database setting, but not for mail files in SmartCloud because no one has manager access to the database, not even to the local replica.

To avoid this problem, simply make sure to set the value of the soft deletions database property to something longer than the time you have set in SmartCloud up to 2160 hours (90 days) before you migrate the mail file to SmartCloud. Don’t exceed that as excessively high values create other problems.  Also do this to the mail template you are using for new users.

The beauty of cloud-based software is the speed that updates are deployed and I expect this will change soon.  IBM is working on refinements to managing the soft deletions with MMRs, but it is still best to deal with this pro-actively before migrating.

Read these articles for more tips on preparing mail files for migration to SmartCloud Notes:
SmartCloud Tip #02: Best Practices to get mail files ready to move to SmartCloud
SmartCloud Tip #03: Important Details to Setting the ACL on your Mail Files