I Ainn't Ded Yet

I'm still shutting things down when we transition to Exchange but in the mean time.... I just ran into a new weird Notes bug that I thought I'd pass along.

We've been having issues with user getting new mail notifications and then looking in Notes and not finding any new mail.... I thought.... hey it's just crazy users when it was just one or two but it soon became apparent that it was happening to everyone (except me - I turned mail notification off a long time ago.)

I looked everywhere online trying to find an answer and couldn't find anything - then today I stumbled across an IBM technote about the problem.

Turns out if you have an entry in the Domino directory with a blank username there's a bug in pre version 7 servers that will cause everyone to get random false positive new mail notifications.

You might ask.... why would you have an entry in the Domino directory without a username.... well that's interesting too.... seems a member of management traded in his Blackberry for an iPhone and wanted us to set it up so his mail was being pushed to the iPhone.... he didn't want his mail forwarded - he still wanted it saved in his Notes client. I'm sure there are several ways to fix this but our quickest solution was to set up a dummy entry in the Domino directory that actually points to his Notes database, setting up a mail group that contains the dummy entry email address and the gmail address we have set up on his iPhone and then change his regular entry in the directory to forward all his mail to the mail group. I went back into the dummy entry and put a dummy value in the username field.

If I have time I may post more about our migration off of Notes/Domino. I've been writing the transition plan and reading all the Microsoft marketing literature for Exchange and Sharepoint. I can already say the new system will be more complex, less robust and much less capable. If we'd been heavy users of clustering, encryption, had lots of current customized databases that couldn't be easily replaced then the process would be very difficult and users would complain.