Like many people working for a large organization, I am saddled with a large and slow email program that includes mail, calendar, contact list, to do functions, etc. In my case the corporate program of choice at my workplace is Lotus Notes. At last count it gobbled up nearly 600 Mb of disk space for the email client. In my view it is the 18-wheeler of email clients with all that implies. Sure it has pulling power and cargo capacity for the long haul, but speed and agility, which are Opera’s important traits, are not in the Lotus Notes play book.
I call it “Lotus Wait” because if you let if go idle for a half hour or so it decides to refresh the synchronization between the client and server before it will cough up new mail. I got fed up one day with this state of affairs and decided to see if I could make Opera work as a Lotus Notes client since it support IMAP mail services. I figured Opera’s blazing speed would make my day. I was right. It did and here’s how. I wanted my mail without the wait and I got it with Opera.
Background
Although the POP3 protocol is the most widely used mail retrieval protocol used today, there is an alternative that overcomes some of its limitations. The Internet Message Access Protocol (IMAP) was designed as a superset of POP3, and enhances both message retrieval and management. Lotus Notes uses the IMAP protocol. By comparison most if not all of your email in Opera is under the POP protocol.
Setting Up the Account
In Opera you need to set up a new email account the same way as you would if you were setting up a POP account. In Opera 8 from the menu choose //Tools and then choose // Mail & Chat Accounts. Click on the [New] button and choose [IMAP] then click on [Next]. Fill in the data fields as you would for any other email account.
Your Lotus Notes Mail server name, which is an IMAP server, and your SMTP server name should be the same. For instance, if your server is Lotus Notes Server 1, and is named LNMAIL01, and your domain is MYDOMAIN.COM, then your IMAP and SMTP servers will be the same, e.g., LNMAIL01.MYDOMAIN.COM Of course they could be named differently.
If you are not sure about your server names, when you send mail using the regular Lotus Notes client look in the lower left corner of your screen for the server name. You can also see it in Notes under //Menu, //File, //Preferences, etc. This will work for version 5 or later versions of Lotus Notes. if in doubt check with your company’s Help Desk.
Getting Mail
Once you have correctly set up the email account, tell Opera to get your Lotus Notes email. Assuming you have folders, Opera should populate them as part of the initial synchronization sequence. Wait a moment for this to happen. Enjoy the show.
When you send mail from Opera your messages will be routed through your IMAP server and will also show up in the SENT MAIL folder in your Notes client as well as in sent mail in Opera. This means your ‘sent mail’ will be on your PC in Opera and on your PC in the Lotus Notes client. That means if you go back to your Lotus Notes client, all the email you sent from Opera 8 will be waiting there for you in the ‘Sent’ folder.
Also, when people send you mail to your Lotus Notes email address, and you download that email to Opera, you will be able to add them as contacts in the Opera address book. You will have to transform Lotus Notes address syntax to Internet syntax. Assuming you know the person’s domain name, their email address is embedded in the Lotus Notes address syntax.
For example: John Doe/JDOE/LNMAIL01/ABUSINESS@CORP would translate as John.Doe@abusiness.corp.com for your address book. If the directory at his firm supports it, you could also translate it as: jdoe@abusiness.corp.com Don’t take this too literally as each site has its own naming conventions subject to the limits of what Lotus Notes offers the system administator.
I don’t know of any way to transfer your personal address book in Lotus Notes to Opera. Your corporate directory is likely way too large to put on your PC anyway.
When you receive mail it will go into the same folders you specified in the Lotus Notes Client assuming you’ve used Lotus Notes rules to route incoming mail to various folders. For instance, I keep email from my manager in the main inbox and route list traffic to sub-folders. One good thing to remember is that under the IMAP protocol, any email from Lotus Notes you download to Opera will still be waiting for you the next time you fire up your regular Lotus Notes client. The email stays on the server until the real client, and not Opera, calls for it.
Caveats
Lotus Notes is a very large program and the client under V.6.5.x is slow even on fast machines and fast networks. You will really like the speed of composing and sending Lotus Notes email from Opera. Unfortunately, you will still have to go back to the LN client to do calendar and any Lotus Notes forms that your company uses. Also, because the Opera M2 email client doesn’t support HTML formatting, you can only send text messages using Opera as the Lotus Notes client. Your email recipients may not notice as their Lotus Notes client will format the message using whatever font they specified in their preferences.
You will not be able to delete email messages from your IMAP server from Opera. You will still have to do that from the Lotus Notes client. This is a function of Lotus Notes and not of Opera. It works the same way under Outlook Express or any other mail client that supports IMAP.
Your IT department will probably give you a storage quota for Lotus Notes. The default is 60 Mb, which isn’t enough for a busy email account. Make sure you go back to the LN client from time-to-time to clean out your inbox and folders. Keep in mind Opera won’t be able to read Lotus Notes archives and you won’t be able to carry over any color coding of email.
Lotus Notes is thought to be heading towards a web-enabled interface for version 7.x and beyond, but for most of us using Lotus Notes version 6.5.x, taking out the overhead by using Opera’s blazing speed is a really nice treat.
Hope this helps.
Thanks again to Dan for writing this all up. See also Opera Sings in America (chooseopera.com) and Dan’s weblog Opera in the News
ps - yes, another day is coming, I promise!