We wanted to store mail documents in a file system & also need to open the stored file using Lotus notes .
Basically we need to know the native format used to store the notes documents in file system.
Thanks,
Kamal.
Subject: store Lotus Notes mail documents into file system
I know that there are 3rd party archive solutions that do what you ask, but they are expensive (and they do a LOT of post-processing to make it work).
One more thing, think about the ways you can encrypt a data note (mail encryption, secret key, DB encryption), and think about how difficult that would be to manage.
Subject: store Lotus Notes mail documents into file system
Adobe Acrobat 8 will export selected messages or whole folders to a PDF file. It’s a manual process, but it works well.
Subject: what about attachments and hidden fields??
Yes, but what about attachments??? If you only want to see the content of the message and don’t care about attachments, conversion to a pdf is easy to implement, but if you need the attachments, a pdf doesn’t cut it.
Also, if you send to pdf, you loose all the meta-data associated with the email (ie the mail header and hidden fields which can be of interest forensically)
Subject: RE: what about attachments and hidden fields??
That’s the neat part about Acrobat 8 - it will embed the attachments in the PDF, so you don’t actually lose them. They appear as an icon in the body of the message (just like in the Notes client) and you double-click the icon to open the attachment. If you export a folder, it creates an indexed PDF - in other words, there’s a list at the top that looks like your Inbox and as you click each line, the full message appears below. This is nice because, unlike exporting a group of messages as text, you don’t get a file that’s a mile long.
I would agree, however, that the much of the routing and note meta-data appears to be lost. The “friendly” headers (From, To, cc, Subject, Date, Attachments) are included in each message. These appear to be custom properties in the PDF.
Considering that a text export contains all the meta-data (but loses the attachments), I bet Adobe could include it if they wanted to.
Subject: RE: what about attachments and hidden fields??
Eric,
Thanks for that. Very cool information. I guess the only other issue might be cost. I’m assuming it requires the full client to do this so unless you have some kind of enterprise agreement, the cost/user could be kind of high I guess you could opt to give someone else rights to see your mail file and do the export for you.
Thanks for the post - good information.
Doug
Subject: RE: what about attachments and hidden fields??
Good point. You do need the full Acrobat product to do this. I work in an educational setting and sometimes forget what software really costs. 
FWIW, I submitted a product enhancement request to Adobe to expose more of the Notes metadata in their Notes PDF Export.
Subject: store Lotus Notes mail…update
Notes mail is actually database records stored in a Notes db. If you want to push a db record to a file based format, you’ll need to do that manually. There are samples of converting Notes docs to text files found elsewhere in this forum, and/or the 4/5 forum so a bit of searching should lead you to a solution.
Not sure how you’d creat a file based object that Notes can open natively - Notes knows NSFs so you’d be creating one NSF per mail message and that doesn’t make much sense.
There may also be 3rd party solutions that may work for you.
Why do you want to push the mail messages to file objects?
Doug
update - think about this - ask the same question for any db system and you’ll arrive at the same answer. 'How would I transfer records from Access, MySQL, SQL Server, Oracle, even Excel to a file based structure? Notes is not Outlook and there is no ‘msg’ file format built into the system.