If your system mail client is Notes, it will only accept a limited amount of characters passed via the “mailto” url. Unfortunately, Outlook will accept many more characters… c’mon guys, this isn’t helping me out with my Notes vs. Outlook… I’m trying to keep this thing alive I tell ya!This is causing a problem with our Cisco phone system in setting up conference calls with automated mail links. This system is set up for Unified messaging with Domino. (it’s a Cisco page, not our own)
Subject: Notes Client accepts limited amt of chars from mailto
What exactly do you mean by “only accept a limited amount of characters”. Is it the number of characters or the character set (special characters) that is causing problems.
Frequently there are ways around such restrictions, but without knowing you exact problem, it’s impossible to assist.
Not that your original posting asked for assistance. Really, all you did was complain about the way things worked without providing details.
Subject: RE: Notes Client accepts limited amt of chars from mailto
My post was meant first to be informative about the limitation. There’s also another post about the character limitation. Performing my own tests, I verified that the amount of characters accepted is limited. I was able to pass over 300 in the mailto url (to a Notes Client), but I’ve read others say less than that. I guess it depends on where you begin counting.
An issue was raised previously to Cisco with respect to their Unity server, which creates a link to generate an email message on a web page of the Cisco Unity server. This link creates an email message including body information that is to be used for conference calls. Cisco’s own support tracking had documented that Notes did not follow the specs provided for the mailto url to work properly, and that’s what I was saying in the previous message. I posted the link they provided in their guide. Perhaps they were just making excuses. I did verify that if the mailto url is too long, in my case, no messages were created at all. On another Notes Client pc, the mail was created up to a point (character limitation).
Based on another post, someone had said that Outlook upped their amount of acceptable mailto char’s within more recent Outlook releases. There’s a .tem script file on the Cisco server that I changed to limit the fields to the subject only (excluding the body field). The original unmodified link works fine for Outlook clients, populating the body field completely.
My personal frustration is only reflected because when issues such as these come up, it feeds the many Notes nay-sayers in our organization that say, “See, Notes is behind, we always have to make exceptions to get everything else to work with Notes properly”, etc., etc., ad infinitum). It’s quite nauseating to deal with when I’m in the extreme minority, and Notes/Domino always seems under the gun in our org, and it’s true now more than ever. Many of those in our org are already believing that before another year comes around, there will be an executive decision made to move to Exchange. So many complaints (mostly unjustified because of lack of user knowledge and improper desktop deployments) have come around that other executives may override the CIO in this. We (in the minority, that can be counted on one hand) are doing what we can in the short term to turn this trend in another direction. I’m still keeping my fingers crossed hoping that we’ll get 6.5.1 out there before we’re forced to move to Exchange. And beyond that, hoping it will last long enough for 7.0 and check out just how much DB2 will weigh in for that release. But who am I, I still wish that Lotus had never let go of ViP.
Subject: RE: Notes Client accepts limited amt of chars from mailto
Let 'em move to Exchange. When mydoom or Sobig brings down the network for the 4th time, start asking about costs of support.
The original cause of the issue is Cisco’s fault anyway. How do you not test your automated email mechanism with the (arguably) leading mail client on the planet? If the link were http, and it worked with IE but not with Mozilla, would you blame Mozilla for not correcting their code, or Cisco for not coding to spec and testing?
Subject: RE: Notes Client accepts limited amt of chars from mailto
Yeah, this whole Cisco thing is killin’ me, I think Unity/DUCS was not tested enough altogether. In addition, I’m thinking that DUCS is not safe to use in clustered environments, as it evidently wasn’t tested by Lotus, and our servers are suddenly crashing a lot more.
Subject: Notes Client does not follow rfc2368 specifications
According to Cisco, The Notes Client does not follow
mailto url specs…
Subject: RE: Notes Client does not follow rfc2368 specifications
According to the spec, the user-agent can reject everything except the To value – it’s all optional, Bub. The Notes client follows the spec perfectly, but the spec is extremely loose in its requirements. Notes allows the addressee and the subject (which is all that should ever be required for, say, an unsubscribe link).
Subject: RE: Notes Client does not follow rfc2368 specifications
According to the spec, the user-agent can reject everything except
the To value – it’s all optional
User agent can reject… Unfortunately users then will reject that user agent 