I realize that on the surface this seems really silly, but I've gotta ask:

One of our users here is moving a significant amount of emails out of his mailbox into a PST.  While the validity of this action has yet to be determined, he expressed his frustration that in that doing so, 'Recover Deleted Items' is filling up with those moved messages.

My explanation to him was that this is working by design because those messages are not getting moved in the same sense that we move papers from a desk drawer into a filing cabinet.  Its more of a copy, paste, then delete operation.

Is this behavior something we can alter so that moved messages do NOT show up in 'Recover Deleted Items'?

I realize that on the surface this seems really silly, but I've gotta ask:

One of our users here is moving a significant amount of emails out of his mailbox into a PST.  While the validity of this action has yet to be determined, he expressed his frustration that in that doing so, 'Recover Deleted Items' is filling up with those moved messages.

My explanation to him was that this is working by design because those messages are not getting moved in the same sense that we move papers from a desk drawer into a filing cabinet.  Its more of a copy, paste, then delete operation.

Is this behavior something we can alter so that moved messages do NOT show up in 'Recover Deleted Items'?

If he is moving them, then no. Its the equivalent of a hard delete. (Versus a copy, then deleting them manually)You could always set his mailbox  deleted item retention to 0 and they would never be available for recovery but that would affect all messages that were hard-deleted or deleted from the deleted items folder and is not recommended.