For many years I have been using Lotus Notes as my mail client for work. We have a clustered Lotus Domino system that handles our mail, group calendaring and a few home grown change management and documentation applications.I have been indifferent to the client. But people at work absolutely hated using the Notes client as a mail client. I really did not know why they complained until a colleague gave a presentation on using Outlook to connect to Domino using IMAP. His searches were fast and comprehensive. He was able to navigate through his mail file much quicker than I ever could with Notes.
To make a long story, I gave Apple’s Mail.app a chance. I connected to our Domino environment using IMAP/S. I was also able to configure Mail.app to connect to my .mac account and gmail account. I was delightfully astonished on how more usable my e-mail client became. I can read, sort and search my mail faster and more accurately. I can also switch between accounts with ease.I am taking advantage of the “smart mailbox” features to group today’s mail, flagged messages and other special message types. I am sold on the search capabilities as well as the Spotlight integration. I also enjoy using some of Mail.app’s third party add-ons. I found two great Mail.app sites: Hawk Wings Plug-ins and Tikouka Plug-ins. I am currently trying out Mail Act-on and MaiTags.
Mail Act-on allows you to map specific mail rules or actions to “Act-On” keys. When viewing mail you can apply the “Act-On” action for a message by making simple keystrokes.MailTags enables you to go way beyond folder filing for organizing mail by enabling metadata tagging. MailTags puts “tags” and “keywords” into the mail message similar to the way gmail uses labels. MailTags are fully search-able and sortable.
If anyone has any other tips, tricks or plug-ins, post about your findings.
Thanks Mike N., Dan and Apple!!!
9 responses so far ↓
Hawk Wings » Blog Archive » Switchers drop Lotus Notes, Thunderbird for Mail // April 30, 2006 at 12:46 pm |
[...] Mike Radomski is surprised to discover that “Mail.app rocks”. [...]
Scott // April 30, 2006 at 3:32 pm |
Just a comment — MailTags in the current version are searchable, but not sortable as they are not displayed in the list view. The upcoming version will have the Tags displayed in list view and consequently will be sortable. More details/teasers can be found at http://www.hawkwings.net/2006/04/20/mailtags-just-keeps-getting-better-and-better/
M. Roeser // May 8, 2006 at 4:54 pm |
Mike,
I’d love to be able to connect to my employer’s Notes server with Apple Mail — are there any tricks? I tried using IMAP, and the connection timed out….
mradomski // May 12, 2006 at 3:16 am |
There are two things that could be prenting IMAP access to Notes.
#1 You Notes admin has not turned on IMAP
#2 There is a firewall blocking IMAP
With a connection timeout, my bet it is either #1 or #2. The Apple Mail setup is straight forward. Make sure your IMAP username is the same username you used for web access.
I would talk with your Notes admin to see if they can help. I also had our Notes admin enable the SSL protocols for SMTP and IMAP (i.e. IMAPS, SMTP SSL) Hope this helps!
Ryan // June 18, 2006 at 7:47 am |
Do you know of any apps that convert Notes NSF to Apple Mail
Agentkow // December 14, 2006 at 12:44 pm |
I successfully got Apple Mail to work with my college’s Lotus Notes / Domino server, but I can’t figure out for the life of me how to configure the outgoing mail.
I’m using IMAP and I can receive mail, move it around and into folders (which is all reflected back in Lotus Notes) but I don’t knwo what the info would be for SMTP. I asked the tech people and they say they don’t “officially support” any other forms of sending mail besides Lotus, but I am SO close and SO sick of Notes and its horrible interface/image handling/link formatting/address book confusing/HTML rendering crappiness.
Can anyone offer some help?
Mark // December 28, 2006 at 5:54 pm |
I write this out of shear desperation.
I’m part of a small group at work testing Apple Mail as a replacement for Lotus Notes. For this test, IT enabled the Domino IMAP server but the server seems to crash every other day. Using Thunderbird didn’t help either. Now IT has abandoned the test and so with it our hopes for using Apple Mail.
Has anyone else run into this problem? It’s obviously a server issue. Can we work around this issue by having Domino forward email to a 3rd party IMAP server that is more reliable?
Is there anyone making this combination work?
Inbox Nil and the Mail Ninja, Intro « Mike Radomski // August 19, 2007 at 6:38 am |
[...] and in many cases he meaningfulness has decreased. Back in April of 2006, I wrote a post entitled Mail.app Rocks! The post has been read heavily and I have received positive feedback on its [...]
me_deniro // November 4, 2009 at 2:02 pm |
It is a solution to integrate ANY mail client with Lotus Domino if you decide to use POP3 or IMAP, but why would you do this?
Lotus Domino has a special gift! The NSF gift! This is a database that can be whatever you decide it to be (mail, application whatever).
Once you migrate form NSF to any other FILE form, you lose this incredible gift.
And, AND, do not forget: NSF is a DATABASE.
A database offer much larger room for storage than an ordinary file. Off course, anyone could say that a file can have any size you want.
That’s true, but a database has indexes and stuff.
A mail client working with and BIG File, has to index itself, and that means slow performance or high costs, depending of the file size.
A database can be indexed anytime, and, the server does this for you.
So..a search in a NSF database is trillion times faster than a search in a file when we speak about huge mail amount, like 25GB for example.
Speaking for big email inboxes, we have to say it! IMAP is the most unhappy choice you may take.
IMAP just can not handle huge inboxes and sooner or later, you’ll have problems, especially when is about a serious number of inboxes.
When dealing with databases there a lot of tricks you can do if something has to be done.
In plus, Lotus has it’s own scripting language, called Lotus Script, in which you can write your own applications or agents.
I write my anti-spam agents for fine filtering the email that escapes from the spamassassin claws
I’m new in the Lotus terrain, but for sure I like it a lot.
I’ve been using, sendmail, posftix, exchange, many. But this Lotus shows a lot of power.
That’s true about the Lotus Notes client, not that fancy as others, but, very good for that is designed to be doing.