Beyond The Yellow Bubble

One of the issues I have been trying to deal with one of my clients recently is the refusal of some people to take a practical approach to managing mail files.  One person's mail file has now grown to 52GB in size, rapidly approaching the 64GB physical limit for Notes databases.  Yes, I had suggesting imposing a policy on mail files and sizes but these were never implemented.  Testing of server-based archiving identified major problems, so this option was shelved for a later release of Notes.  So this week I turned my attention to DAOS.   We were installing a new Mail server with Domino 8.5.   After making a copy of this mail file and compacting it for Notes 8.5 ODS the file size reduced to 48 GB (probably the view indices and FT index being discarded).  After turning on DAOS and compacting the database a second time the new mail file shrunk to a tad less than 6GB.  By my calculations that is an 88% reduction in size!  Thanks to DAOS this person should be able to continue to accumulate mail for a few more weeks and I can now return to more trivial matters such as explaining why Notes takes a few seconds to open a mail file with 75,000 documents in the in-box.

One of the many classes in the .Domino Framework is the DominoMemo class.  The class is designed as a helper class for applications that have a need to compose and send e-mail.  A primary reason for trhe class is to remove the need to know and understand all the special fields used by Notes memos.  This code is contained in the base.Domino.MailServices and Domino.MailServices LS libraries.  The next release of the .Domino Framework will contain a number of enhancements to this class based upon requirements I have had for a number of recent projects.

Properties:-
Body : NotesRichTextItem - I have added a this public property to allow direct manipulation of the content of the body of the memo - e.g. to add a tab
ExpiryDate : NotesDateTime - Allows direct access to set/read the expiry date for the memo
Principal : Text - Provides a way to change the name of the sender when the memo appear in the in-box for Notes and some Internet mail clients
Logo : Text - Controls which logo is displayed at the top of the memo
ReplyTo : Text() - Sets the e-mail address used when the recipients uses reply
Sender : Text - Changes the identification of the sender of the memo.  This changes the From, Principal,  and DisplaySent fields that can be used by different mail clients to display who sent the memo.
Sign : Text - Used to control if the memo should be signed before it is sent (Note: Notes has an anoying habbit of signing memos by default in some cases)

Methods:-
Initialize() - Initializes the memo by setting the value of Form to "Memo"
Notify(testSend : Boolean) - This is an existing method that sends the memo to the intended recipients.  The method tests if the database is a production database.  If it is not, the recipients are changed to be just the current user and a message appended to the bottom of the memo with details about the intended recipients if the database had been in production.  This method is used to prevent worklflow applications from sending messages from the Dev//QA environment to anyone other than the tester.  The method has been enhanced to deal with issues of positioning text that can occur when the body of the memo has been copied from another document (e.g. to include attachments without the need to extract).
RenderDocument(Source : NotesDocument) - Appends an image of the nominated document into the body of the memo