Lotus Notes cc:Mail MTA is an optional integrated Message Transfer
Agent that you use with the Lotus Domino 4.5 (and higher) servers.
Lotus recently released a special hot fix that updates the version of
CVS installed with cc:Mail MTA 4.6.3a. It resolves a particular
problem in which the message conversion process removed characters
from the body of certain messages. This fix is intended for use with
cc:Mail MTA 4.6.3a ONLY. You can download this hot fix from the
following Lotus FTP site:
Notes has all kinds of ways to format, create, send, and forward
mail messages. One action allows you to copy an existing message
automatically into a new message. This means you can use the first
message but alter it--for example, adding new information or deleting
existing information. To do this, open the Mail database, select or
open a message, and choose Actions, Copy Into, New Message. A new
message opens in edit mode with all the information in each
appropriate field (To, From, Subject, Body, and so forth). You can
change the message as you like, then send it along.
Sending a very important Notes mail message? Well then, let the
recipient know. To give a message high-priority status, click Delivery
Options from the Actions bar while you have the new message open. (You
can also select Actions, Delivery Options.) In the section labeled
Importance, open the drop-down menu and choose High. When the message
is delivered, Notes displays a special High Priority icon next to the
message.
Besides designations for High or Low priority, Notes also allows
you to indicate the nature of your message. If you are sending a
thank-you note, for example, you can include a Thank You icon within
the message. When you create a new message, click Delivery Options
from the Actions bar (or choose Actions, Delivery Options), opening
the Delivery Options dialog box. Open the Mood Stamp drop-down list
and select one of the mood options. An icon representing the
particular mood appears on the message.
When you need a reply by a certain date, you can include this
automatically in the Notes mail message. When you create the message,
choose Actions, Special Options from the Mail database menu. Enter the
date you want in the "Stamp message with a 'Please reply by' date"
box. Click OK to close the Special Options box. Notes creates the
response indication in the message. After the recipient gets the
message, the reply-by indicator also appears in the To Do view.
Just like quarts of milk, Notes mail memos can carry expiration
dates. This date indicates to the recipient that the message is not
important after the stated date. When you create a new mail memo,
select Actions, Special Options to open the Special Options dialog
box. Enter the date in the Expiration Date box, then click OK to close
the Special Options box. The memo's shelf life is all set.
Notes allows you to forward any mail message or document. Actually,
you can forward several messages at the same time, a convenient way to
combine several messages into one. To do this, open the Mail database
(or any other database) and select the messages you want to forward.
This combines the selected messages into one mail message; you can
edit the content as you like. Just address the message and send it as
usual. If you want to use this technique to combine messages in your
mailbox, send the message to yourself, then delete the original
messages.
Notes includes several letterhead styles for your mail memos. This
is the stylish graphic that appears at the top of your mail memos. To
choose your letterhead style, open the mail database, then choose
Action, Mail Tools, Choose Letterhead. Choose the style from the list
that appears. When you select a style, the preview appears below the
list box. (If you don't want any letterhead, choose Plain Text.) Once
you have your letterhead set, click Done. Now you've got some spiffy
memos.
Notes has two ways to tell you mail has arrived-- a chiming sound
or a text box (or both, if you want). To set notification, select
File, Tools, User Preferences, opening the User Preferences dialog
box. Click the Mail icon, then check the Check For New Mail Every
option and enter the number of minutes between each notification in
the Minutes box. Now check Audible Notification, Visible Notification,
or both. Click OK to close the box and save your settings. The New
Mail dialog box appears whenever you get mail, no matter what program
you happen to be working in, so choose this if you are waiting for
important mail.
Sure, some people may think getting notified of new mail is
neat--but it's not for everyone. In fact, most Notes users can carry
on very nicely not knowing that they have new mail every 15 minutes.
If you don't need to know about new mail, select File, Tools, User
Preferences, opening the User Preferences dialog box. Click the Mail
icon, then uncheck the Check For New Mail Every option. Click OK to
close the box and save the settings.
You can set Notes to save any message you send. However, if you
don't want to save all your sent messages (it does fill up the
database), you can set Notes to prompt you before saving. To do this,
choose File, Tools, User Preferences from the Notes desktop menu,
opening the User Preferences box. Click the Mail icon, then select
Always Prompt from the Save Sent Mail drop-down list. Click OK to save
the setting and close the User Preferences box.
When you save your sent messages (if you choose to do so), Notes
puts them in the Sent view. However, you can save sent messages in
folders of your own choosing. This is a good way to organize sent
messages. After you create and address the message, click Send And
File to open the Select A Folder box. Select the folder to which you
want to save the message, then click Add. Notes sends the message and
puts a copy in the selected folder. (You may want to create specific
folders for specific messages.)
Here's the quickest way to get new mail. Click the Mail icon in the
status bar (the envelope), then select Scan Unread Mail. This opens
your mail database and displays the first unread message in the Mail
database.
There are many ways to view your Notes mail messages, but one of
the most useful is to view messages and their replies grouped together
in chronological order. This is called a discussion thread. To get
this view, open the Mail database and choose the Discussion Threads
view. The whole conversation appears before you.
There are times when you want to use the same message format again
and again. Notes allows you to do this through a mail feature called
stationery. It's particularly useful when you send many messages to
the same groups or list of recipients. To make message stationery,
create the message, giving it a format you want to reuse. Select
Actions, Save As Stationery from the Database menu, then enter a name
for the stationery in the Save As Stationery dialog box. Click OK, and
Notes saves the message in the Drafts folder as stationery. The next
time you want to create a new message with this stationery, open the
Drafts folder and highlight the named stationery, then click Use
Stationery.
GETTING PERSONAL STATIONERY
The last tip showed you how to create stationery in the Notes Mail
database, which allows you to use the same format and recipient list
over and over. It's like having a form letter on file. That format
uses the basic Notes mail message, but Notes also allows you to create
stationery you can customize with your own headers and footers, with
rich text, graphics, or both. To create custom stationery, open the
mail database and choose Actions, Mail Tools, Create Stationery.
Choose Personal Stationery in the Create Stationery dialog box, then
click OK. This opens the Personal Stationery form. The top field
(above the word From) is for the header, and you can enter formatted
rich text or paste in a picture. The bottom field (below the Body
field) is for the footer, and you can do the same. Enter the
information in the other fields--To, CC, BCC, Subject, and Body--as
you would with any other mail message. Click Close, then click Yes in
the Save Stationery prompt box. Notes saves the message in the Drafts
folder as stationery. The next time you want to create a new message
with this stationery, open the Drafts folder and highlight the named
stationery, then click Use Stationery.
CHANGING STATIONERY
Nothing needs to stay the same forever, not even Notes stationery.
You may want to change the format, recipient list, or text. This is no
problem in Notes. Open the Drafts folder in the mail database and
highlight the stationery you want to edit. Click Edit Document, then
choose Edit This Stationery from the Edit Document dialog box. Click
OK, and Notes puts the stationery in Edit mode. Make the changes you
want, click Close, then click Yes in the Save Stationery dialog box.
If you have questions, comments, or suggestions about a particular
database, you can mail database managers directly. You don't even need
to know their names. To do this, select the icon or open the database.
From the Notes menu, choose Create, Mail, Special, Memo To Database
Manager. Notes opens a memo form with the current database managers
included in the To field. That's it--complete and send the message as
usual.
Notes is a great way to link information and documents, and you can
easily create mail messages that include links to document in other
databases. This allows the recipient to see the linked document while
reading the message. To do this, open the database that contains the
document and select it. Choose Create, Special, Bookmark. A new
message appears that includes a link to the selected document.
Continue with the message as you would any other Notes mail message.
Some messages need to go around the block. If this is the case, you
can use Notes to send a message to a list of recipients in sequence.
Each recipient in the chain can add a comment before sending it to the
next recipient. To set up the sequence, open the mail database and
choose Create, Special, Serial Route Memo. In the Route To field,
enter the recipients in the desired order, making sure you separate
the names with commas. Complete the message as you would any other
mail message. If you want Notes to send you a message when each
recipient receives the message, check the Notify Sender At Each Stop
option. Click Send To Next Person to start the chain.
In addition to regular Notes mail memos, Notes includes a few
specially formatted memos. One of these is a Phone Message, which
allows you to send a special message to someone you've taken a phone
message for. Let's say you have an office mate who is on the road, and
you take a phone call for him. Knowing he'll dial in remotely for his
Notes mail, you take the following steps to inform him specifically
about the phone call. From your Notes mail database, select Create,
Special, Phone Message. (If you're in any other database or the Notes
workspace, select Create, Mail, Special, Phone Message.) Enter the
appropriate address(es) in the To, CC, and/or BCC fields. Next, enter
the name of the person who left the message in the Contact field. If
needed, enter the appropriate information in the Of, Phone, and/or Fax
fields, then click any of the options that apply at the bottom of the
form. If you want to add a message, enter it in the Message field.
Finally, click Delivery Options and select the delivery options you
want, then send the memo.
As a Notes mail user, you are aware of the basic mechanics of
addressing and sending mail. Enter an address in the To (and CC and
BCC), field, and the message wings its way through cyber-Notes space
to the intended recipient. To get the message to its destination,
Notes looks up all the addresses in the Public Name And Address Book
(NAB) to make sure they're valid Notes users or groups. Now, most NABs
are pretty big, and Notes doesn't want to do any work it doesn't have
to, so it stops at the first match for each addressee by default.
Usually this works just fine, but there are some instances where the
addressees may be similar or have more than one Notes ID. With this in
mind, Notes allows you to instruct it to look across all NABs for all
matches, then presents you with a list to choose the address you want.
You set up this option in the Location document of your Personal NAB.
With the Location document in Edit mode (it can be either new or
existing), look in the Recipient Name Look Up field. To have Notes
look through all NABs, change the field from Stop At First Match to
Exhaustively Check All Address Books. Save and close the Location
document and you're all set. Be aware, however, that looking through
all NABs can take a long time, so choose this only if you really want
it.
You can manage your mail from the Mail Indicator icon of the status
bar, which is at the bottom of the desktop window (the Envelope icon).
This saves you from going into your mail database or using the mail
menu. Click the indicator and you get this list of mail options:
Create Memo, Scan Unread Mail, Receive Mail, Send Outgoing Mail, Send
And Receive Mail, Open Mail. Click any of these to perform the action.
When you read a document in the preview pane, it doesn't open the
document, so normally the document is not marked as read. However, you
can have Notes mark any documents you preview as read. To do this,
choose File, Tools, User Preferences from the main Notes menu. Under
Advanced options, select "Mark documents read when opened in preview
pane." Click OK to close the User Preferences box and save your
settings.
If you want to send documents from a form automatically, use a
simple Send Mail action. You can send the document either in its
entirety or as a link. Select the database, choose View, Design, and
put the form in Design mode. Create a new action, then select Simple
Action(s) and Add Action from the Design pane. Select Action, Send
Mail Message. Enter the recipients in the To field and the document's
description in the Subject field. Next select either Include Copy Of
Document to copy the entire document into the message or Include Link
To Document to create a link to the document in the message. Click OK,
then close the form and save your changes.
The last tip explained how you can forward a document from a form
automatically through a simple Send Mail action. You can also use a
simple action to send the document directly (rather than copying or
linking it in a mail memo). The difference is that you must have a
SendTo field in the form, with a list of designated recipients. To
create the action, select the database, choose View, Design, and put
the form in Design mode. Create a new action, then select Simple
Action(s) and Add Action from the Design pane. Select Action, Send
Document. Click OK, then close the form and save your changes. When
you activate the action, the entire document gets sent to the mail
recipients.
The Notes mailbox can fill up pretty quickly. If you want to save
old messages but don't want to clutter your active mail box, set up a
mail archive. The easiest way to archive is to do it automatically.
This means Notes moves messages to a separate archive database when
they meet certain criteria you've set.
It's easy to establish an archive. Open the mail database, then
access the Archiving view. Click Setup Archive, which opens the
Archive Profile document, then select the options for the profile.
Click Specify Archive Location, then choose the location and name of
the archive database. Click Save Profile; Notes saves the profile and
creates the archive database. Finally, click Close, closing the
Archive Profile, then click Enabled Scheduled Archiving in the
Archiving view.
Suppose you just signed up for cable network and you've spent an
hour on the phone configuring your computer to surf the Web again. But
when you try to connect to your Notes server, you get a message
indicating the server is not reachable (that is, "No route is known
from this host to the destination address" or "Computer is not a known
TCP/IP host"). The last thing you want is to undo your new network
settings, and you shouldn't have to. After finding out the fully
qualified name of your Notes server or its IP address, try this:
1. Open the Windows Control Panel (Start, Settings, Control Panel),
select Network, and under the TCP/IP properties in the DNS
Configuration tab, add the appropriate domain to the domain search
order.
2. Return to Notes, open your Personal Address Book, find the
Connections view (under the Advanced section or Servers, depending on
your version), and click the Add Connection button.
3. Change the Connection Type to Local Area Network, select TCP/IP as
your port, add the Notes sever name in the NOTESSERVER/NOTESDOMAIN
format, and, under the Advanced tab's Server Destination Address
field, add the fully qualified server name or the TCP/IP address of
the server.
4. Save this document and try to connect again.
Be careful with this one. Default settings are typically the most
reliable ones, but it doesn't hurt to take a look. To do so, open the
database in question. Then select File, Replication, Settings. Click
through the tabs to see your options. If you see a date in the option
Only Replicate Incoming Documents Saved Or Modified After, you can
safely clear it with no fear of disaster.
Several things can affect replication. To start with, check the
time settings on your computer. Then check your Notes time setting by
selecting File, Mobile, Edit Current Location. Under the Advanced tab,
you'll see a setting for your time zone. Once you've made sure the
time is set correctly, open the database in question, then select
File, Replication, History, and select Clear. This will force the
replica not to assume it has replicated anything before; it will do a
more thorough check on what is and isn't there.
The quickest way to start a new memo, no matter what database
you're currently in, is the shortcut Ctrl-M. This uses your mail file
to start a new memo and saves the message in your Sent view, if you
have that option turned on.
You've asked your Notes administrator whether you can replicate
your personal address book to your home PC, and he or she gave you an
emphatically negative response. The best solution to this problem is:
1. Choose which computer (work or office) will have the address
book you update.
2. From this computer, occasionally copy the names.nsf file to a
removable storage device (this is your personal address book file and
appears under your Notes data directory, typically c:\notes\data or
c:\lotus\notes\data).
3. Rename the file to something like mynames.nsf.
4. Copy it to the Notes data directory of your other computer (again,
probably c:\notes\data or c:\lotus\notes\data).
5. In Notes, select File, Preferences (or in earlier versions of
Notes, select Tools), User Preferences . Under the Mail & News tab,
add a comma after the last local address book, then add the file name
of your new address book (it should now read names.nsf, mynames.nsf if
you have no other local address book).
6. Close and open Notes to put the changes into effect.
You can test the change by addressing a message to someone who is
only in the latest version of your personal address book.
You'd think deleting a file or document would immediately recover
space in a database--but this is not the case in many databases,
including those of Notes. What you've done is marked a file for
deletion--you haven't actually recovered the space. In order to
"squeeze the air" out of your database, you must compact it. The
server does this automatically every night if the database resides on
one and the administrator has set this option to run. But if you want
to compact your database immediately, or it's local, do the following:
Highlight your database icon, then select File, Database, Properties.
Find the I tab (for Information) and click Compact. If you are not on
a Notes 5 server, you will need to stay out of the database until
compaction finishes.
Tired of looking for someone's old memo to get the right e-mail
address? Just add that individual to your address book the next time
you open a memo he or she has sent. In Notes 4.5.x, you can do this by
selecting Actions, Mail Tools, Add Sender To Address Book.
Unfortunately, the user name ends up identical to the e-mail address,
and you'll have to go inside your address book to edit it. Notes 5.x
has a more elegant interface. After opening a memo, select the Tools
icon, then Add Sender To Address Book, and in the dialog box you can
edit how this person appears in the address book.
If you are not on Notes 5.x, you can't have a signature unless you
create a smart icon or your Notes administrator alters the template to
allow signatures. If you have upgraded to the Notes 5 mail file
design, try the following.
>From your Inbox or just about any view, choose Tools, Preferences.
Click the Signature tab and Use Text option, then add a signature to
the Signature field. Click the line that says "Automatically append a
signature to the bottom of my outgoing mail messages" and click OK to
save your changes. You can test whether it worked by sending yourself
a memo.
By default, you can only do this in a Notes 5.x mail file. If you
have upgraded to the Notes 5 mail file design, do the following:
>From a view, choose Tools, Preferences. Click the Signature tab,
use HTML, and choose the appropriate HTML file. Click the line that
says "Automatically append a signature to the bottom of my outgoing
mail messages" and click OK to save your changes. To test, simply send
yourself a memo--but sending to an outside mail account such as
Hotmail will give you a better idea how others will see it.
When you're entering text in a field that allows formatting (such
as the message portion of a memo), you can quickly left-, center-, or
right-justify a paragraph with the justification icons. You don't need
to highlight a whole paragraph to use this feature. Just place your
cursor anywhere in the paragraph or line and click the appropriate
icon. If you've got your icons turned on, you'll see three icons at
the top with thick black lines indicating what type of justification
they create.
You make an important statement to another coworker in a memo, and
you want to make your supervisor aware of the memo's contents. For
whatever reasons, you'd rather not have that person know you're
copying someone else on the memo. Why not add your supervisor's name
to the BCC field? When recipients get the memo, members of the To and
CC fields will not see a record of anyone in the BCC field. This
technique is also useful when you're sending to a large mailing list
and privacy is an issue. If you send the memo to yourself and include
everyone else as a blind copy, no recipient knows who else appears on
the list.
In the Notes 5 mail template, you can have the spelling checker run
by default whenever you send an e-mail message. To turn this feature
on, change to your Inbox or another view and click the Tools button.
Then select Preferences. Under the Spell Checking section of the Basic
tab, click "Automatically check mail messages for misspellings before
sending".
Let's say you accepted an invitation to a meeting from one of your
coworkers. As usual, this immediately put the appointment on your
calendar. Now that you've acted on the message in your Inbox, it's
time to delete it, right? Wrong. Notes stores this document only once.
When you accepted the invitation, it turned the document into a
calendar appointment. If you delete the message, you've also deleted
the appointment. What's the solution? Lotus recommends one of the
following scenarios--depending on your style of working:
Option 1: Select Actions, Calendar Tools, Calendar Profile,
Advanced Options, and choose the option to remove invitations from
your Inbox after responding to them. As soon as you accept an
invitation, it creates a calendar appointment and deletes the message
from your Inbox.
Option 2: Create a new folder for invitations. Once you've accepted
an invitation, drag the message into the folder and leave it.
Everyone is getting more and more e-mail, and sometimes it's hard
to be sure people are reading your messages. One way to make an
important message stand out is to mark it as high priority before
sending it. To do this in Notes 5, click the Delivery Options button,
make sure you're in the Basics tab, then change the Importance option
to High. Your Notes recipient will see a red icon in his or her Inbox
that indicates your message should not be ignored.
Numerous keyboard shortcuts can speed up your text editing. For
example, you can enlarge selected text to the next available font size
by simply pressing the F2 key. Shift-F2 returns the text to its
previous size.
In Notes 4.x, you can enlarge the default screen fonts using the
Preferences option--but it's buried a little deeper in Notes 5, and
you have to add a line to the notes.ini file. The notes.ini file is a
configuration and preferences file that lives in your Notes program
directory on your local hard drive. By default, it will be in the
c:\lotus\notes directory, but use your Windows Find program to locate
it if you don't find it there. After opening the file in a text
editor, add the following line:
Display_font_adjustment=x
Replace the x with the number of points you're adding to the
default size--it must fall between 0 and 25. Start with a small number
like 2 and see how you like it. After editing and saving the file,
restart Notes to see the changes.
Did you know that you can use Notes as a browser? You can set it as
the default browser for opening URLs you receive via e-mail by
selecting this option in your Notes location document (covered in a
previous tip). In Notes 5, you can manually open URLs within Notes by
clicking the URL icon or by using Ctrl-L as a shortcut. An address box
appears; type the URL you are looking for. Once your Web page opens, a
new tab appears--you can close this by clicking X or pressing the
Escape key. You'll find navigational shortcuts at the top right of the
Notes client.
Many word-processing formatting tools are available when you're
composing memos. If you're mailing to an Internet address, don't
bother with formatting--anything fancier than text and spaces gets
lost in translation. But if your recipients are within your company
and on Notes, you can add bullets by clicking the bullet icons and
putting a hard return after each bullet. You'll notice two icons--one
for straight bullets and one for numbered bullets. Using the indent
icon will add a bullet sublevel.
If you can't change the font in your current field, you're probably
entering data in a plain-text field. Plain-text fields do not allowing
formatting and are limited to 15KB of text, so you might wonder why
programmers would use them. They do have their advantages. They're
very useful in preserving consistency in data documents, and unlike
some other fields, they can display the contents in view and folder
columns. When you're looking at your Inbox, the sender and subject
columns are plain-text fields. If they were text fields that allowed
formatting, you would need to open the documents to see their
contents.
Say you're writing a memo and you want to indent or outdent a
paragraph for emphasis. There's probably an icon for this, right?
Right. Just place your cursor anywhere in the paragraph and click the
icon that looks like a page with a right arrow. To outdent, click the
opposite icon (it looks like a page with an arrow going to the left).
When you respond to documents, it's sometimes helpful to make
comments in a different font and color than the original text. The
easiest way to do this is to use the Permanent Pen feature. This
allows you to set a special font that you can toggle on and off when
needed.
To set your permanent pen font in Notes 5, put any document into
Edit mode, click the Text menu, then choose your font, including the
color. Click the Text menu again, choose Permanent Pen, Set Permanent
Pen Style. When you first set the Permanent Pen style, that will also
turn it on. You can turn it on or off at any time by choosing Text,
Permanent Pen, Use Permanent Pen. Alternately, if you have your icons
turned on, you can toggle Permanent Pen on and off by clicking the
icon that looks like a felt tip pen.
By the time you receive a memo in Notes, it appears to have been
sent to your exact Notes user name. This is because the server looked
at the original SendTo address and matched it with your name in the
public address book. Sometimes it's useful to see the address as the
sender entered it. In Notes 5.x, you can do this by opening the memo
and clicking Tools, Delivery Information. Under the Delivery And
Routing Information box, arrow down until you find the To and BCC
information, and you will know who the sender thought he or she was
addressing. In Notes 4.x, you'll find Delivery And Routing Information
under the Actions menu. If very little information is available, the
memo probably came from someone on your Notes mail system.
You spent 30 minutes creating the funniest memo in the world, with
12 different fonts and a pasted-in picture of your dog destroying a
Frisbee. You press Send, expecting to dazzle your best friend with
your computer skills and your newfound sense of humor. Now, two days
later, you discover that it arrived at the other end looking
completely unlike what you sent. Notes did it again, right? Probably
not--if you sent the message to an Internet address (typically
identified by the dot-com ending), it went through several
transformations in an attempt to find the lowest common denominator
between mail servers. On this windy road, generally most servers have
text in common--graphics don't fare as well. If you send plain-text
memos and use file attachments for the graphics, you'll probably be
fine--but occasionally even this is too much if the message encounters
a size limit along the way. Server space and bandwidth is costly, and
IT managers limit message sizes to preserve the bottom line.
If you use Notes in the office and on the road and are tired of
waiting for your replicas to update after you leave the office, there
is an easier way to handle this problem. The next time you're in the
office, try this out.
Click File, Mobile, Edit Current Location. Look for the Replication
heading and change the Schedule field to Enabled. The default settings
schedule replication once an hour, seven days a week, but you can make
the intervals longer or shorter. Save the document and check your
replication page every so often to see if your databases are
replicating in the background.
If you're using the Notes 5 client and mail template, you can
select a different word processor for creating memos. To turn this on,
click File, Preferences, User Preferences, then select the Mail And
News tab. Under the Configuration section, an option for Alternate
Memo Editor gives you a choice of Microsoft Word or Lotus Word Pro.
Make your selection, click OK to save your changes, then restart
Notes. If the word processor is not installed on your system, it will
use the Notes word processor instead.
If you'd like to have a more personalized look for memos, try the
Personal Stationery option. In Notes 5, simply create your memo
template, then click Tools, Save As Stationery and give it a name. To
use the stationery, go to the Stationery folder and select the
appropriate stationery.
If you use Notes as a browser, you may want to use the Personal Web
Navigator to track your URL history. If you've opened a URL with the
Notes client, the Personal Web Navigator can keep a history for
returning to favorite pages.
To create this unique database, choose File, Database, New. Leave
the Template server as Local, then scroll down the list of templates
until you find the Personal Web Navigator template. Now choose Local
as Server, Personal Web Navigator as Title, Perweb.nsf as File Name.
Click OK to save. As usual, Notes creates this database in its data
directory, so make sure to back this up.
