There are at least three good reasons why we’re using Lotus Notes, so mostly this post is just here to make me feel better. Thank you for sharing my pain; please comment with any solutions you’ve found for this problem.
Today, I decided that I would delete all my old Lotus Notes mails that have been building up. This is partly because I’ve been getting warnings for the last three weeks about my quota, and partly because I remember my empty inbox with fondness.
I click my Inbox on the Workspace.
I start at the bottom, with my mail from way back in 2005. I can’t just shift-select a ton of mails – I have to individually tick every single one. I have a preview window; of course, this means that if I accidentally click on something large, Lotus Notes carefully loads the attachment into memory before allowing me to delete it. (I have no idea why it does this, since it loads it all over again if you actually open the mail. And again if you decide to open the attachment.)
I tick a screenful of mail, press delete, and get the “Type Mismatch” dialog:
All the mails now have crosses against them, but haven’t actually been deleted.
I figure that maybe, just maybe, Lotus Notes will do this if I log out. So, I quit Lotus Notes. When I open it again, all the crosses have gone and the mails are still there.
So, I try again. Tick. Tick. Tick. This time, I just close my inbox. Lotus notes kindly asks me, this time, if I want to delete 77 mails. Absolutely I do! But apparently, Lotus Notes exists in a different timezone to us mere mortals, and it’s too early:
Hm. My mails are still there, and the crosses have gone again.
I have spent hours now trying to delete my mail. Of course, now I remember why they were building up in the first place…
Liz Keogh, lunivore 
What are the good reasons – i swear at it every day.
1) Security
2) The ability of non-technical management to create shared databases with the correct permissions (but obviously we wouldn’t have to use it for email to do that)
3) The ability of some upper management to send sensitive emails which cannot be forwarded simply by clicking the forward button (it’s disabled).
I agree – Notes sucks. Why are’nt we just using GMail’s corporate option, whatever it’s called. Mail, calendaring, documents, etc., we’d get it all with no maintenance overhead.
Though I’d settle for *anything* other than Notes. Frankly it’s embarrassing that ThoughtWorks uses it.
Cheers,
Simon B.
simon@brunningonline.net
http://www.brunningonline.net/simon/blog/
GTalk: simon.brunning | MSN: small_values | Yahoo: smallvalues
(In Notes 6, at least …)
you can hide the auto-preview pane, by clicking on the little arrow at the top (or by going to view -> document preview and unchecking) — this should speed things up no end
multi select is easiest by using shift and the arrow keys (up/down) – you can do it by using shift and hovering the mouse over mails in turn too, but its a bit trickier
ctrl-a also works for select all
hope that helps
— Andy Y.
Mmm, trouble is I keep coming across items I want to keep, so I’d have to stop doing the shift-arrow. Maybe I should practice with the whole shift-hover thing…
Ctrl-a is no good since that would delete all the most recent mails that I definitely need to go through, too! Thanks for the hints anyway.
Ahh, I knew I knew you from somewhere! One of my minions found your blog entry about StyleReports today and was murmuring in agreement.
1 is fixable, there are plenty of alternatives.
2 is unrelated to email so is a really bad reason to pick a mail client which annoys me every day.
3 is just stupid – it’s asking for some emails not to be email – I’d happily just stop receiving these.
Google StyleReports
Not the kind of advertising you really want on the front page of your search… 😀
Yeah, I don’t think they’re good reasons either. But I’m assured by The Powers That Be that the reasons are sound. It must be true.
From the screendump fragments I see here, the solution might be to make one of the emails-selected-for-deletion the current one, by just clicking on it once.
Johan (also frustrated by being forced to use that dreadful Lotus Notes)