Hi
We are a Notes shop. A decission to go to Exchange/Oulook is pending. In a recent meeting it seems that a big factor in the decission is the appearance of our mails when sent via SMTP.
The Outlook fan club tell of this feature where a Rich Version of the e-mail is sent (in WinMail.DAT). Recipients see a Rich version of the e-mail instead of the SMTP version.
The mail looks good and our clients have a more favourable impression of our company.
Have Lotus addressed this issue in Notes or Domino 6?
I know about the feature when I can set “Send this email to other Notes users via the internet.” This is on a per message basis, so will get forgotten most of the time.
I am looking for more that that I am looking for Notes reading and creating winmail.dat of its own. Or an even better alternative.
I hope someone can help.
Many thanks for reading this far
Subject: Good looking emails to Outlook clients
In R6, there is a configuration setting on the server to convert outgoing mail to HTML. I tested it out with hotmailand outlook express. I was able to receive forwarded notes forms almost exactly as they look in the notes client.
Being just html renderings, they weren’t functional, but they were worlds above the plain text messages.
I also wouldn’t put much stock in the whole winmail.dat argument. It’s all fine if your recipients all use Outlook to retrieve
their mail, but those who don’t can’t read the attachment and have no use for it. It’s a proprietary method of sending
rich text formatted messages, similar to Notes Rich text formatting. (see Microsoft’s technical support article at
http://support.microsoft.com/support/kb/articles/Q241/5/38.ASP).
Here’s a snapshot of the config setting in R6.
Subject: RE: Good looking emails to Outlook clients
Thanks Chris,
I know exactly what the winmail.DAT file is I spend part of my time explaining what it is to Exchange Administrators. What is it with exchange people, they send out winmail.DAT files and them blame Notes for receiving them. Geeezzzz.
I just thought it would be neat if Notes & MS had got together and agreed that winmail.DAT was the way to go.
Yeah ,I know, its about as likely as a French man ever saying, wow those Brits are great at soccer. (A Brit who is looking forward to giving Leitenstien a bit of a spanking).
Subject: RE: Good looking emails to Outlook clients
isn’t that what HTML and MIME are for? Why would we want to adopt MS’s proprietary approach?
Subject: Good looking emails to Outlook clients
Is there a way of setting the “MIME” flag programatically. Or the other way of saying it would be "Is there a way to send email vi LotusScript and setting the flag which will send the email in MIME format. It can be schedule Agent.
Subject: RE: Good looking emails to Outlook clients
It is possible to selectively send MIME messages, but only by creating the MIME parts yourself. In R5, this meant using a third party product such as our (Midas Rich Text LSX) or using Jvamail or such solutions. In Notes 6, you can use the NotesMIMEntity classes yourself to build the message, although you will either need to create all the mime parts yourself and create the HTML message yourself (or else still use Midas).
What others are suggesting is that if you set the send as MIME, all your messages will automatically be converted. Is there a reason why this would not be a good solution for you?
Subject: RE: Good looking emails to Outlook clients
MIME is a much better solution than outlook’s proprietary solution.
Rather than modify individual location docs, use a Profile/Settings doc to turn this on for all of your users.
Subject: *I agree about MIME. Good point about the Profile/Settings doc…
Subject: WOW Thanks for all your responses.[eom]
…
Subject: *Send as MIME - you can’t beat that over internet
gneib
Subject: locationdocument - send as MIME?
If you want to send rich text formatted emails to internet addresses, make sure your location document is set to send MIME. On the tab ‘mail’ of the location document, make sure the field Format for messages addressed to internet addresses: is set to ‘MIME format’.
If this is set to ‘Notes Rich Text’ ( wich is the default), the Domino SMTP server has to convert your message, formatted in Notes Rich Text, to MIME. This conversion will lead to loss of message fidelity.
I’ve never had complaints about message fidelity of sent mail after correcting this setting!
Subject: But you lose your disclaimer
If the outgoing message doesn’t go through the conversion process, then any outbound disclaimer message that you’ve defined (by re-designing mail.box) won’t get added.
It’s a real swine! See technote #1087361 for this technique. I know this is an R5 technote. If anybody’s got a better way of doing it in D6, without using 3rd party products, I’d love to hear about it!
Cheers,
Subject: Correct - that’s the trade off
Subject: RE: locationdocument - send as MIME?
The ‘MIME Format’ works great for us sending to Outlook users. I send to my family and other business contacts who all get rich text messages (embeded graphics, bold, colors, fonts, etc.) when reading my Notes messages in their Outlook client.
-chris
Subject: Good looking emails to Outlook clients
As you mentioned, you can do the “send this email to other Notes users…” As you can see by that, there is a limitation - only other notes users can benefit from that solution. With Outlook Rich Text (winmail.dat) only other Outlook users benefit with that. Try (with Outlook RT enabled) sending an attachment to a non-Outlook user and the user will get an attachment. BUT, the attachment will be called winmail.dat.
There is a give-and-take either way. If you turn on Outlook RT, you will have to remember to turn it off if you’re sending to a non-Outlook user. On the Domino server you can send the messages in Notes Rich Text as well.
You may want to mention the poor formatting of Outlook RT when sending to non-Outlook clients. Domino and Exchange are neck-and-neck in the e-mail market, so it’s likely that you will have some people who won’t be able to read it either way.
If you use Domino for more than just email, then stick with it. If not, then…
Chris