Lotus Notes and Domino

On 05/24/2018 11:08 AM, Grant Taylor via cctalk wrote: I was EXTREMELY impressed with how well Lotus Notes worked as an email client for Lotus Domino when it came to online / offline use. First: I had Notes configured to replicate my email (DB) off of the Domino server so that I could have access to it even if I was offline. I don't recall how Notes behaved if I transitioned between online / offline in the event of a network (dis)connection. (It rarely happened.) But I was easily able to change the so called "Location" from "Online" to "Offline" (or any other location that I defined) on the fly with absolute minimal impact by clicking a drop down and selecting a different location. The most likely small burp would be if I naively left it in the Online location when starting up without the company VPN connected, thus unable to communicate with the Domino server. In such a case, Notes might take 15 ~ 30 additional seconds to open as it tried to connect before it would give up trying to connect and say "Unable to connect to server, starting in Offline mode." I could easily start the VPN after the fact and switch to "Online" mode and do a Replicate (what Notes termed the Send & Receive). I could easily draft email while offline and it would sit in my outbox waiting for the next time I replicated. IMHO it worked great. Aside: I had this same type of behavior for other non-Mail DBs inside of Notes too. My employer used a LOT of Notes DBs for various things. Vacation planner was a Notes DB. Inventory was a Notes DB. Team documentation repositories were Notes DBs. Each team have a different document repository (Team Room) Notes DB. Different people had different levels of access to different DBs. Further Aside: I could easily enable DB level encryption of the local replica of a Notes DB trivially. I could also turn encryption off or change security level easily. *ALL* of my Notes DBs benefited from these (and more) features; replication, online / offline, encryption, meta data indexing, full text indexing, and many more. Second: The thing that I did with my email that was *SO* impressive to me was that my email DB on my workstation was a replica of my email DB on the Domino server. With the exception that my server replica was < 300 MB (disk quota) and my local workstation replica > 2 GB. ? Yes, the same DB had bidirectional replication between > 2 GB and < 300 MB. This is what amazed me. I configured custom replication between the my workstation and the server such that: 1) Deletes from the server copy were not replicated into my workstation copy. 2) The server copy only maintained messages that were < 30 days old. (I needed to replicate within that window, but 30 days is not a problem.) 3) ALL modifications to the local copy were replicated to the server copy. This allowed me to use my email like I had no disk quota at all. (Based on amount of storage on my workstation.) I could leave all my messages in my mailbox /with/ attachments left in tact. (Many colleagues removed attachments form messages to shrink their inbox. I didn't have that problem.) All the while I was able to stay well under the 300 MB disk quota and stay out of "Mail Jail". As an added bonus, I was able to leverage the company provided web mail interface and access the email that was still on the server (within the 30 day window). Anything I sent / received / marked as (un)read would get replicated into my workstation copy the next time I replicated. In my (not so) humble opinion, Lotus Notes & Domino has got to be, hands down, the absolute BEST replicated email infrastructure that I've ever seen. I do think the UI was fairly ugly and somewhat clunky. That being said, I was able to do compose email / team documents with features that I LONG for in Gmail. In hind sight I would have liked to have a tiny Domino server (which Notes was in some ways) that was an IMAP / SMTP interface for a local copy of Thunderbird. - I think that would have given me the aforementioned features /and/ what I considered to be a better UI. -- Grant. . . . unix || die