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You are here: Home › Blog

A topical discussion about HTML mail in the Notes client from last night



To catch everyone up, I mentioned the TSA stuff since I was taking another trip.  It ends up that as soon as I arrived, I headed to a meeting of bloggers (ie: drinks and festivities at the Millenium Hotel) from Los Angeles.  Included were some great people I know and some new ones I met.  Wil Wheaton (yes that guy), Sean Bonner (one of the founders of blogging.la which I found out is a city with their own domain for gosh sakes), Travis Kalanick (former founder of Scour.Net now founder of RedSwoosh) and McGivney (which we now know started her own Domino blog).  I ended up in a discussion with Chris Pirillo about numerous things, including RSS Feeds, but the Notes client crept in of course since they use that over there internally (I think but forget to ask).  His one complaint was rendering HTML mail received from the Internet in the client and how horrendous it was.  I agree that in early days it was.

  • Notes 4.6x saved HTML mail as an attachment to be launched in the web browser
  • Notes early 5.x couldn't render right to save itself it seemed
  • Notes later 5.x made great improvements in this but with network constraints it was still unusable if there was a proxy the user had to authenticate with to read some of the HTML HREF from the web.  Starting in 5.07 Lotus offered the following option to "cure" that.   MIME_CONVERT_HTML_TO_ATTACHMENT=1    This of course took you right back to 4.6x days of having to use the browser to see it.  It did however force the user to authenticate to get all the required HREF URL's
  • Notes 6.x comes along with even better handling except for newsletters.  Some of the images can be skewed to the side among other things. (currently no fix technote #1117078).  There was also some issues with certain messages crashing the client (technote #1160168 which I take great interest in since I get that newsletter)
But the point of this long list is to show the improvements that were made and where there still needs a ton of work for HTML mail.

Converting the mail to Notes Rich Text in Domino 6 (which one technote offers as a solution) defeats the purpose of even getting it in a non-text format in the first place.

So after the brief conversation we had on this particular topic, I agree while disagreeing that the HTML rendering can bite.  Then again I tossed out that you don't see any freaking HTML type viruses jumping on Domino do you?  I think I saw a *sigh* and the hands raise to that, amen.