$ForwardSep subform in mail database - Wierd?

HCL Domino Domino Forum
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Hi everyone,

I discovered an oddity with the $ForwardSep subform, which is used by

@Command([MailForward]) and NotesUIDocument.Forward(). If anyone knows how to overcome it, please tell me. I have Notes 6.5.2 on Windows XP, and I found this behaviour in the Notes client

When you do @Command([MailForward]), Notes looks for the subform $ForwardSep and includes it in the body of the forwarded message. Under normal circumstances, this is all fine.

In our firm we we have lots of shared mailboxes. Typically there is one mailbox per client, and the mailbox receives external emails from people at the client. Each mailbox is accessed by a team of people in our firm.

Here is the oddity; If someone forwards an email from one of these shared mailboxes, the $ForwardSep subform is included in the body. BUT, it’s the $ForwardSep subform from their own personal mail file, not the one from the shared mailbox.

Example; I as “Ian Jones” open the shared mailbox for “HugeCorp, Inc.”, open an email and forward it.

The forwarded email contains the $ForwardSep subform from my own mail file, not the one that’s in the shared mailbox for “HugeCorp, Inc.”

The standard subform consists of just one line like

“— Forwarded by Ian Jones/Acme on 13/09/2007 —”

I need to change it a bit in some of these shared mailboxes.

The behaviour seems a bit bizarre to me. Even though the current (shared) mail file has a $ForwardSep subform, Notes looks elsewhere to find it, and ignores the one in the current mail file. Is this the way it’s designed? Or is there some setting that tells Notes where to find the $ForwardSep subform?

I have checked the NotesUIDocument.Forward() method also. It behaves the same way as @Command([MailForward]).

Best wishes, Ian

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Subject: It also gets the MEMO form from our own mail file

I just discovered this also… When you do an @Command([MailForward]), it uses the MEMO form from your OWN mail file to compose the new email. Even if the current database (a shared mail database in my case) contains a MEMO form, Notes ignores it and fetched the MEMO form from you own mail database.

I think I can work around all this by not using the Forward commands (@Formula or LotusScript). Instead, I will try LotusScript to compose a new Memo from scratch, and copy the fields one by one from the original email. I can build the Body field as a new NotesRichTextItem. This also allows me to put in whatever I like as the “forwarding separator”, instead of relying on the $FORWARDSEP subform.

Best wishes, Ian

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Subject: RE: It also gets the MEMO form from our own mail file

Unless you store the form in the sent message, the forms, subforms, and so forth that the recipient sees are the ones in their OWN mail database. Remember, all that you are normally sending are field values, and the form is only referred to in the Form item of the document.

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Subject: $ForwardSep subform in mail database - Wierd?

As expected. All e-mail is created from your own mail database, not the database you happen to have open at the time.

You can forward documents from any Notes database, not just mail databases.

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Subject: Thanks Graham, yes you are right

I got misled by the fact that my database is a group mailbox. As you pointed out, the mail forwarding feature is designed to work for ANY database, therefore it will always look for your own personal mail file. It does not first check the current database to see whether it has a “Memo” form or any other emailing features.

Here’s how I solved my problem… I added a shared action to the group mailbox, using LotusScript. The action picks up the current email document, creates a new Memo document which is a copy of it, and then sends the new document. This way, I can add extra fields to the forwarded email whichever way I like.

(The forwarded email goes to “Winmail Extractor”, a database from openNTF.org. In order for Winmail Extractor to respond correctly, it needs to know that the message it received came from a shared mailbox, not from someone’s personal mailbox. I indicate this by an additional field on the forwarded email.)

Best wishes, Ian