I didn’t get any new mail last night. Lotus Notes obviously feels sorry for me; it’s helpfully marked sixty-five random messages as “unread” so that I have something to look at this morning. The newly unread mails are scattered throughout the inbox and ten other folders. There’s no pattern that I can see in date, sender, recpient, subject or content.
Thank you, Lotus Notes.You’re so thoughtful and considerate.
Update: I have carefully marked all my messages as “read” again, but Lotus Notes is desperate for me to read them, and has just unread another ten messages for me. Perhaps I should be looking at every fifth letter or something to find the secret message it’s trying to give me? The mystery deepens…
Liz Keogh, lunivore 
Ahh, I remember lotus notes – the fun to be had after you played with the config settings…
Are you using lotus notes web mail as well? This is probably the reason both systems don’t play too well together…
Nope; not using web mail as far as I’m aware…
6.5 is a lot better at managing this.
I have a peculiar problem too. My notes always shows the number of unread messages as actual + 1. I have searched the entire inbox for that missing unread message, but can never find it.
Really? My copy of Lotus Notes 6.5 obviously missed that memo.
Notes doesn’t feel sorry for you 🙂 actually it is a server problem. Most usually found within clusters when the person who designed the cluster did not correctly design the real time replication.
Notes holds unread marks both in the client and the database. The client side unread marks are held in the cache.ndk file in your Notes data directory. This records when you last synchronised your unread marks with the server.
You don’t say whether you use a local replica or are working on the server. However the resolutions are the same.
Shut down Notes. Delete the cache.ndk file.
Start Notes.
If you are running on a cluster, you will have two (or more) mail files. You will need to know how to go to the Notes workspace. Go to the workspace, select both (all including local) mail file icons by shift clicking them. From the Edit menu select Edit->Unread Marks->Exchange Unread Marks
That should hold you for a little while. But I suspect that if unread marks are out of sync you are not going to stay synced up for long.
For the person who asked about the inbox issue. Go to the All Documents view, select everything that is unread and mark it read. Problem solved.
The perrennial problem with Notes. It all works just great if you know what you are doing 😉
Neil Thomas
Of course… why didn’t I think of that? 🙂
Thanks, Neil; now I know how to fix it next time. Of course, it’s marginally easier just to mark everything as read and try to work out which ones were genuinely new, but that’s just me being lazy.