Our situation: our field offices each have a mailfile for the office itself, in addition to each user having their own mailfile. All users in the office access the office mailfile and may need to send replies out of it. We have standardly created manual agent “form replies” for this; the user chooses the emails to respond to and runs the agent from the actions menu.
In earlier versions of Notes (specifically, in 4.x – we went straight from R4 to ND6), the manual agent would send the emails as from the Office mailfile, with a “sent by” line indicating the actual staffer triggering the agent. In Notes 6, this no longer works – each email appears to be sent by the Staffer, and responses to those emails are not coming back to the office, but rather the individuals. This is NOT what we want.
I understand that the “On behalf of” option doesn’t work on manual agents. So, what I’d like to know is, what can I do to get back the VERY USEFUL functionality we had with earlier versions of Notes? This is NOT an improvement.
Please note, I am an end-user administrator. I’ve been working with Notes for over 8 years, but I know almost no Lotus Script, and I do not do development.
Suggestions?
Subject: Change in Manual Agent Behavior – now what?
Sounds like the agent was adding a “Principal” and possibly a “ReplyTo” field to the outgoing emails. That still works in R6. If the agent is in LS, you may just need to recompile in R6. Just open the agent in R6 designer, add & remove a space and save it again. See if that clears the problem.
If not, post the code of the agent here. Maybe something special needed to be done for this to work in R4x that no longer works in R6.
Hope that helps.
Subject: RE: Change in Manual Agent Behavior – now what?
Wing, thanks, but as I said, I don’t work in LS, and there’s no custom code to post – we haven’t coded anything. This is an agent created out of the available tools under Agents in Designer. It’s a manual “reply to sender” agent, triggered from the Actions menu on documents selected by the user. It does nothing more than send a form reply to the selected senders, then moves those documents to a folder. We’ve been using exactly the same kind of agent for years.
The question really is what has changed in Lotus Notes so that an agent which formerly picked up the name of the database it was in is now picking up the name of the user who triggers it – and how can I turn it back?
Subject: RE: Change in Manual Agent Behavior – now what?
So your R4x agent was created using “simple actions”? If you open the agent in R6 Designer, you see something like this:
And emails sent out with this agent would appear to come from the office but also show who actually sent it? Something like this:
I must admit, I don’t see how that “simple actions” agent produced these results. Unless there was some other customization done to the “office” mail database. Is it possible that the Memo form in the office mail database was updated by adding a Principal field to it’s design? I’ve never tried that before but I think that would give the same functionality as programmatically adding it to the email.
And when your company upgraded to R6, I guess the mail databases were also upgraded to the R6 design, inadvertantly wiping out that Principal field and causing your current problem?
If this is the case, the simple fix would be to add the Principal field back into the design of the Memo form. But as I’m sure you’ve read in this forum, very few people will advocate updating the mail database for this very reason (of possibly wiping out custom changes in future upgrades).
Hope that helps
Subject: RE: Change in Manual Agent Behavior – now what?
Wing – thanks for the response and sorry for the delay in responding. Actually, you pegged it perfectly – except that we never created a Principal field and the only modification we ever made to the header was to put our company name into it. The “sent by” is the way our emails have always been sent when the sender is not the owner of the mailfile.
I may have to go back to the user again and see if our problem is the agent/mailfile – or the recipients. Thanks for your assistance; I really appreciate it.