From: Jonathan Katz Date: 01:13 on 31 Jan 2004 Subject: Lotus Goats After three and a half years of using whatever mail client I wanted that accepted IMAP v4 I'm now at a new gig where the corporate mail standard is Lotus Notes. Lotus Notes Blows Goats, get it? First and foremost, in the day and age of GUI mail clients one would expect that when you drag-and-drop a file into a message-compose window it would attach that file. No, not in Lotus Notes. It EMBEDS the file if it is a Word or HTML file or some such, making a message nearly unreadable or un-editable if you're sending a large document. Then, if you drag-and-drop a document into Notes, it embeds and becomes slow. Windows XP surprisingly and correctly reports "Not Responding." Although Window's Task Manager does not have the beauty of 'kill(1)' I can easily close out Notes. That's fine, except there is a ntlhplr.exe (or similar) program running in the background which does directory lookups for Notes. That's all fine and dandy, but upon restarting Notes it will fail to start, claiming that there is a lock-file in use and that the only way to fire-up Notes is to log-out or reboot. Using my magic powers gleaned by Google I found the advice I needed to find the ntlhlpr.exe process (or whatever it's called) and was able to kill that and successfully restart Notes without having to logout, quit what I was working on, or lose my ssh sessions to many hosts actually doing stuff. Wait until I start commenting about Siebel.
From: peter (Peter da Silva) Date: 14:59 on 31 Jan 2004 Subject: Re: Lotus Goats > First and foremost, in the day and age of GUI mail clients one would > expect that when you drag-and-drop a file into a message-compose window > it would attach that file. No, not in Lotus Notes. It EMBEDS the file > if it is a Word or HTML file or some such, making a message nearly > unreadable or un-editable if you're sending a large document. Yeh, you have to use "attach". The problem with Notes is that it's not a mail client. It's a distributed database... kind of like you'd get if you were to give a bunch of old-time mainframe hacks and DBAs the job of building the World Wide Web... with the Notes client the browser. So that message you're editing? That's a document, with 3270-like fixed fields mixed up with editable sections. Think of it as a mail program you're going to get all messed up. Technically it wouldn't be at all difficult for a reasonably skilled Notes hacker to write an IMAP-Notes proxy that treaed your local replica as the IMAP server database and let you run any local IMAP client to view it. The problem is that it doesn't seem to be something any reasonably skilled Notes hacker would think of writing... because by the time they've become skilled enough thir brain has been rewired for the Notes world... it'd be as hard to imagine as someone in the FSF bothering to write an Info file browser that doesn't suck dirty swamp water when they've got GNU Emacs at hand. Now that I think of it, there's a lot of similarities there. It's a complex and powerful application that you can program to do anything, and once you're doing that you don't see any point in using separate dedicated programs that interoperate with each other... you just pile more macros and lisp on what you already have. Which works well enough, except it's frustrating for people on the outside who haven't joined the collective yet. I wonder if you could get GNU Emacs to work with a Notes replica. Or would there be some kind of explosion?
From: Jonathan Katz Date: 00:26 on 01 Feb 2004 Subject: Re: Lotus Goats On Saturday, January 31, 2004, at 09:59 AM, Peter da Silva wrote: > Yeh, you have to use "attach". Yeah, I found that out the hard way... > The problem with Notes is that it's not a mail client. It's a > distributed > database... kind of like you'd get if you were to give a bunch of > old-time > mainframe hacks and DBAs the job of building the World Wide Web... > with the > Notes client the browser. So that message you're editing? That's a > document, > with 3270-like fixed fields mixed up with editable sections. Think of > it as > a mail program you're going to get all messed up. Exactly; we've been forced to use Lotus Notes as *gasp* Change Control Tool as our management has all up through the ranks as former mainframe operators. > The problem is that it doesn't seem to be something any reasonably > skilled > Notes hacker would think of writing... because by the time they've > become > skilled enough thir brain has been rewired for the Notes world... it'd > be as One of our Siebel Application admins is a former Notes admin. He tried doing some neat tricks involving filtering but was shot down as his changes were "unauthorized by corporate." He absolutely hates Notes and was nearly ashamed to admit that he used to write software for it.
From: peter (Peter da Silva) Date: 01:58 on 01 Feb 2004 Subject: Re: Lotus Goats > One of our Siebel Application admins is a former Notes admin. He tried > doing some neat tricks involving filtering but was shot down as his > changes were "unauthorized by corporate." He absolutely hates Notes and > was nearly ashamed to admit that he used to write software for it. I wonder if he'd be interested in doing a client IMAP gateway... then you could do all the filtering you wanted from scripts on your own box...
From: Ann Barcomb Date: 11:44 on 02 Feb 2004 Subject: Re: Lotus Goats On Sat, 31 Jan 2004, Peter da Silva wrote: > First and foremost, in the day and age of GUI mail clients one would > expect that when you drag-and-drop a file into a message-compose window > it would attach that file. No, not in Lotus Notes. It EMBEDS the file > if it is a Word or HTML file or some such, making a message nearly > unreadable or un-editable if you're sending a large document. I despise this aspect of Notes. I would hate it less if there was an alt-key combination I could use to get the attach dialog, but I think I can only access it through the menu. I also hate the fact that it closes the attach dialog after I've selected a file. Whenever I need to attach several files and they are in different directories, I either end up zipping them even if they are tiny, or copying them to one folder so I can shift-attach them. I also wonder why the default for clicking the X on a 'New Memo' is 'Send and save a copy' instead of 'Discard changes'. - Ann
From: David H. Adler Date: 21:11 on 02 Feb 2004 Subject: Re: Lotus Goats On Fri, Jan 30, 2004 at 08:13:49PM -0500, Jonathan Katz wrote: > After three and a half years of using whatever mail client I wanted > that accepted IMAP v4 I'm now at a new gig where the corporate mail > standard is Lotus Notes. Lotus Notes Blows Goats, get it? You, sir, should know better than to involve Goats in this. :-) dha
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