A customer within a large organization uses the Notes connector to route messages between Lotus Notes and Exchange 5.5. This worked fine for a couple of years.
Now, after the customer upgraded from Notes 4.6 to 6.0, mail sent to Exchange from Notes 6 clients are returned due to a addressing problem.
The Gateway on the Notes side is still Notes 4.6.7!
The customer uses the default addressing format defined in Exchange as &d/site/organization@gateway
The problem is the format of the display name which formally looks as follows:
Lastname Firstname (OU1/OU2[/OU3]) for individuals and
OU1/OU2 Group Mailbox (OU1/OU2) for some of the department mail boxes.
e.g.
Meyer Christian (MRA/IT1)
Christensen Morten (MRA/IT2/OP1)
MRA/IT1 Group Mailbox (MRA/IT1)
this translates to:
Meyer Christian (MRA/IT1)/replicator/theorg@EXCHANGE
Christensen Morten (MRA/IT2/OP1)/replicator/theorg@EXCHANGE
MRA/IT1 Group Mailbox (MRA/IT1)/replicator/theorg@EXCHANGE
While this could been handled in Notes 4.6 strange thing happens in Notes 6. The addresses becomes invalid and cannot be translated into an abbreviated form.
In Notes 4, after a refresh when entered into a names field, the address
Meyer Christian (MRA/IT1)/replicator/theorg@EXCHANGE
is stored internally as
CN=Meyer Christian (MRA/OU=IT1)/OU=replicator/O=theorg@EXCHANGE
and displayed in its abbreviated form as
Meyer Christian (MRA/IT1)/replicator/theorg@EXCHANGE
In Notes 6after a refresh when entered into a names field, the address
Meyer Christian (MRA/IT1)/replicator/theorg@EXCHANGE
will be converted to and displayed as
CN=Meyer Christian (MRA/IT1)/OU=replicator/O=theorg@EXCHANGE
You can test this behaviour by using the following formula in a button (in R6):
@Prompt([Ok]; “Canonicalize”; @Name([Canonicalize]; “Last First (xyz/abc)/site/org”));
@Prompt([Ok]; “Abbreviate”; @Name([Abbreviate]; “CN=Last First (xyz/abc)/OU=site/O=org”));
@Prompt([Ok]; “Abbreviate R4”; @Name([Abbreviate]; “CN=Last First (xyz/OU=abc)/OU=site/O=org”))
Now, while this just looks ugly in views such a message can be sent to the Exchange Gateway Mailbox where the canonical address will be converted to an abbreviated form, since it’s still on Notes 4. However, the conversion doesn’t work and the address
CN=Meyer Christian (MRA/IT1)/OU=replicator/O=theorg@EXCHANGE
will be converted to
Meyer Christian (MRA/replicator/theorg@EXCHANGE
instead of
Meyer Christian (MRA/IT1)/replicator/theorg@EXCHANGE
As a result, the user cannot be found on the the Exchange side and an undelivery report will be sent back to the sender.
There are similar issues with the address book which contains the Exchange addresses. Since it’s a large organization it will take some time before all Notes clients have been migrated to Notes 6. However, migrating the Gateway to Notes/Domino 6 would probably solve the address book problem but not the addressing problem anyway.
Has anybody seen similar issues and found a viable solution? Any ideas to get it solved?
Peter