Subject: sending Link Message to internet recipient
I know that I may get blasted for jumping in here with a commercial suggestion, but this can be a very slippery slope, and I wanted to give you a heads up if you are starting down it. Doug Finner, who jumps in later in this thread, is a current user of our software, so he may have a useful and more objective perspective as well.
With your version of Notes/Domino, doclinks will be converted to Notes URLs under certain conditions. These links will work in Outlook under certain conditions. Unfortunately, there are a number of problems with putting those conditions together.
The first, and most obvious, problem is that the hint server is not used. Thus, if you send a doclink from a database on Server A to a user who has no replica or only a replica on Server B, the doclink will point at Server B. Since it is a replica, you might think this is no big deal, but what if the two have not replicated yet? The person who receives the email will click on the link, which will try to resolve with Server B. Unfortunately, the error message that comes back is that the document has been deleted. That doesn’t let the user know that the server just hasn’t replicated yet, so they are left frustrated and calling the Help desk, which won’t have any very useful answer except “Wait, and keep trying!”
A second problem is that the Notes URL without the hint server shows up as notes:///repid/viewunid/noteunid, but in some versions of Outlook, the software will think the three slashes are a mistake and will “correct” them, thus giving you notes://repid/viewunid/noteunid and the repid is assumed to be the server, so the link fails.
A third problem is that in some versions of Notes (I don’t recall if 6.5.4 is one of them), if the view was a private view or secured view, the message will also be that the document was deleted.
A fourth problem is if the mail goes through a server which strips to plain text, or if the mail is read by a Blackberry user instead of an Outlook user, for example, the link will simply disappear, or be left as the word Link but no longer an actual link. This can also happen if the server is not the mail server, or if the link is sent through an application and points to a server other than the mail server, or in a few other esoteric situations.
For all of these reasons, as well as some additional functionality that allows more configurability, we offer a product called CoexLinks that is used by many, many companies who must coexist with Notes/Domino and other email systems, especially Outlook. As a bonus, our new version, which is about to go into beta, provides high fidelity MIME rendering, so that your messages in Outlook actually look like your messages in Notes, rather than having different tables widths, borders, fonts, etc. and looking clunky. See my recent blog post on Top 10 rendering goals to see examples of what I mean by this.
Again, sorry for the commercial interruption, but I hope it at least provides you with some areas to investigate.
the use of the word link in the code is not a hyper link. The code creates a file with a “ndl” extension, which has to be associated with LN by the OS. (Dreaded Windows, of course) the format of the NDL file is in my previous post. I am trying to find where I got the bulk of the code from - normally I comment it in to the code, but didn’t here. 
In another part of the code, I attach the file link.ndl to the outgoing e-mail. I actually look at the NAB to determine who is using Outlook and who prefers LN. Then send a notes link to the LN user and this to the Outlook user. Our use of Outlook will increase, we just got bought by a Fortune 100 company. But they are incredibly impressed w/ our LN apps and I am hopeful we will move some of them “up the tree”.