Jan Schulz

How do I do that? There seems to be no language chooser in the preference/profile and since the update to 2.5 I get a German interface on bleedyellow (with all content in English) :-(

Language of blog content = language of userinterface

I've set my browser to German as a first language, so that get search results from my country and don't disturb any browser switch. But changing the language of the template of an blog, which is in one language, so that the menu and other stuff is in a different language is just annoying...

Any Idea how to get it back to English?

Since a few days, I get my private mails delivered into my Notes mailbox, so that I can process my private mails as well as my normal "company" mails with eProductivity. But most of this article is not specific to eProductivity, you can do this with the normal mailfile as well.

There are great instructions how to setup notes to get the mails from a POP3 server on the "Lotus Notes 8.x Tips" blog. If you get mails from both a domino server and a POP3 server, I recommend to first create a new location and switch to it and then run the described wizard... I had to recreate my normal (-> mail goes out via Domino Server) online setup afterwards.

Anyway: this works really well apart from one point: up to now I read mail my private mail in Thunderbird and used ThunderBayes to filter out spam. Notes, unfortunately does not have a spam filter, but this is how you can work around this limitation. Another limitation is, that notes does not process mailrules for POP3 mails, but there is an OpenNTF project for that. So here is the setup to fight spam in POP3 mails delivered to the Notes client:

1. Setup SpamBayes
2. Configure Notes to use SpamBayes
3. Setup POP3 mailrules
4. Configure a Mailrules to filter Spam
(5. Train the filter)

Setup Spambayes
I use SpamBayes, which is a baysian/learning spam filter which acts as a proxy beween the POP3 server and your mailclient and classifies the mail as ham (=good), unsure or spam (=bad :-) in some custom mail-header.  Just download the windows version and install (make sure it is started automatically as a service!). Do a restart of windows, to make sure you have the service running... Afterwards point you webbrowser to http://localhost:8880/config and configure SpamBayes to connect to your current POP3 server and a local port number (the rest of the options are ok for now :-). You don't need to input your username/password into SpamBayes.



Configure Notes to use SpamBayes
Now configure your Notes POP3 mailsetup as you would before, just with "localhost" and the local port number and Notes would get the mail through SpamBayes. If you have already configured it: the config is in the personal adressbook under "Advanced -> Accounts". My final setup looks like this:


Now you should already get mails delivered into your mailaccount which have the new mailheader: Open a new mail, goto "View -> Show -> Page Source" and you find something like this:

Setup POP3 mailrules
No we need something to filter on this. Go to the POP Mail Rules OpenNTF project and get the latest release. It has a nice Install instruction, but for the impatient: copy the rules.dll next to your notes.ini file and add a "EXTMGR_ADDINS=rules.dll" line to your notes.ini (if there is already one, read te instructions...). Restart Notes and your POP3 delivered Mails will be filtered by your mailrules.

Configure a mailrule to filter Spam
Now we have only one problem: how to get a Mailrule to filter on the "X-Spambayes-Classification:" Header? This is also done by a trick: the new extention has some extra capabilities, which can be accessed when you build a rule based on the BCC field: instead of you adding the string you would filter, you add "header:string" and the rule engine will base the filter on that header instead of the BCC field or better that field in the final mail document in your mailfile. There is unortunately a difference beween header names and fields: notes converts '-' in headernames into '_' in fieldnames. So if we want to filter by Mail with "X-Spambayes-Classification: spam", we need to add a BCC rule with a "contains"-String of "X_Spambayes_Classification:spam" (and move that mail into the junk folder (in eProductivity, Mailrules are under E-Mail -> Tools -> Rules):

And that was it: from now on, every classified spam mail should be filtered into the Junk folder.

Train the filter
On problem remains: how to train the filter. This is best done via the webinterface at http://localhost:8880/review: just classify the daily mails there and train the filter with that data. After a few days, it should get better and better until you get less and less false classified mails. For this to work, you need to cache messages in SpamBayes (see SpamBayes webinterface -> Configuration -> Storage options). The other option, to send messages to "spam@localhost" or "ham@localhost" does not work, as Notes does not send every old mailheader. Also, we haven't configured notes to send maisl through spambayes.

Happy emailing!

Opening weblinks in notes does not work, if you have opera set as your default browser. This is unfortunately still so in the 8.5.1 beta client.

Today I found the solution after looking at the registry values when firefox is the default browser: notes seems to miss a '%1' string in the returned registry value. Adding that to the registry lets Notes open URLs in my preferred browser.

before:
C:\Programme\Opera>reg query HKCR\https\shell\open\command
HKEY_CLASSES_ROOT\https\shell\open\command   <NO NAME>   REG_SZ  "C:\Programme\Opera\opera.exe"

After:
C:\Programme\Opera>reg query HKCR\https\shell\open\command
HKEY_CLASSES_ROOT\https\shell\open\command     <NO NAME>   REG_SZ  "C:\Programme\Opera\opera.exe"  "%1"

So, just edit that registry key and add the "%1" (with quotation marks around both strings!) and you are done...

Why Notes can't handle default browser which do not register themselves in that way, when every other programm can.... I've filed bugs both with opera and IBM (in the beta forum)...

And just to be on the secure side:
Disclaimer: IBM Lotus Notes/Domino and Lotus Notes Traveler 8.5.1 is prerelease code and there are no guarantees from IBM that the functionality presented or discussed will be in the final shipping product.

Found this on Ed Brills twitter feed:


Is that the famous "Air cover"? Just wondering, because I couldn't find any reference/speculation/blogpostings to this tweet in the yellow bubble.

That's at least the impression I get after reading all the blog postings about xPages and the new 8.5.1 client. Forms, Pages and so on are out and the future UI will be done in xPages for both the notes client and web.

(Disclaimer: I've not yet seen the new DDE and xPages as a design element and also not the 8.5.1 closed beta with client side xPages)

I'm in two minds about this development. My only impression of xPages are the webpages, which came to life in the last month and I find them horrible from a technical viewpoint: no valid HTML, no accessible build in, wastefull source code, JavaScript is needed to get basic functionality. Bah! Thats not one step backward in web development, but several miles in my opinion. Something like replacing something horrible with something new and then only getting half the way and getting the buggy alpha version (=80s html coding with tables and without css) instead of something state of the art (clean css layouts, progressive enhancement, accessible).

On the other hand I'm currently trying to build a translated web 2.0 UI for the notes client and that's a pain. You need one hack after another to get the experience right, some things simple don't work, (re)styling the whole UI is tedious at best (even with CSS or tools like NotesHound or Ytrias suite) and you get a lot of "strange" behaviour (or bugs? I'm too tired to reproduce and report all the small things along I discovered while playing with @Elements in HideWhen and uidoc.refresh from "on event postsave" of another document. First would be that the debugger only "sees" one opened doc...). Even translated GUIs are a big hack and not every element is translatable (the "subaction"-action in the action bar always shows the name, not the label -> looks like a bug; View lables not at all, buttons only by using Client JavaScript).

So getting a new, clean and probably proven development model and interface (I guess, that a browser is used to display client side xPages and not another GUI interpreter) is a good thing, even if I would need to start from zero again with Notes development.

Another good thing is, that this way a "hip" technology gets into notes development: web-development with html, css and javascript. This will lower the entry barrier for new developers coming from that direction, which is especially important for my (student) organisation with new people every two years: now someone with some web developer experience can hack together some new feature without getting to learn a complete new technology (and note sis new, because there is no "personal" use for notes). With some luck they wouldn't even need to code twice, as xPages should work the same in the web and in the client.

And it still go all the great technologies like security build in, replication, ... just with new, better and fresh UIs, which do not look like last century anymore. Finally a wiki in the client! Yay! So one reason less to complain about Notes :-)

So I think, that xPages and SSJS will replace LS and all the "old style" design elements or at least put them into deep maintainance mode. Which is itself the second negative point: I don't believe that all the bugs and shortcomings in the old style design elements will be fixed and so the only way going forward is redoing it all in xPages.

But overall I thing that xPages are great news for lotus notes: it gets rids of the weak point while keeping the strong points.

If the resulting html-code wouldn't be so "old style". Please, IBM, fix that! And you, dear reader, go vote on that :-)

After reading Chris Toohey's Quickpoll about Framesets vs. Web I started to think about rewriting a typical Notes Interface (outline to the left, views on the right) to be more "web 2.0" friendly with a landing page. To complete the challenge, the UI should be translateable and, of course, nice looking. The first problem: the typical landing page has "call to action" buttons: big, shiny buttons with an icon and some text. So, how can you do that in Notes? My tries:

• Buttons: can be translated via onLoad events and "document.forms[0].Button.value = document.forms[0].cfdField_LabelForButton.value", no icons possible
  
• HTML pass thrugh Computed text (=translateable) with <input>s -> just plain ugly.
  
• HTML pass thrugh Computed text with <button>s -> Does not work, as the notes internal html parser does not recognise the button tag
• Notes Table (with nice looking background + rounded corners) and a hotspot -> does not work, as the hotspot can't be set around the table and also because I haven't found a way to vertical center text in a table cell.
  
• Outline with one entry, styled with rounded corners, translateable the UI (lables are computeable), mouse over effects for the text. Only problem: setting width to "fits to content" has no effect, which means that the translations must be as long as the original text (seems to me that this is a notes bug).

Here is a screenshot:


The last one with the styled outline entry seems to be the best idea up to now, but the "fit to content" problem is bad :-(

Anybody with some ideas how to get nice, translateable, hover aware buttons with icons on it in the notes client?

Here is the demo DB...

Our user are not allowed to change the "owner" of the mailfile via Mail-Policy.

Unfortunately you can still change the owner via web:

=> You can change it and it is saved.

We discovered this by accident: our mailfile is slightly altered, so that we can put Mail-In Names into it and use it as Teammailbox. The only change is to remove part of the validation formular for the owner field (which checks for hierarchical Names), so that the preferences can be saved (like for a signature change). Unfortunately this also is not so in the web version: you still get the message that the Owner must be hierarchical and so some clever person changed the group mailbox to his own name :-(

As this is anyway changeable by tools (and we have some people who discoverd such tools...) it does not seem to be a security risk, but it seems that this makes using the default template as a team mailbox or generaly in the web slightly more troublesome :-(

This is 8.0.x... Fun...

This is mainly here so that I don't have to google another half an hour...

The Policy setting to get the install menu back is in "Desktop policy settings -> Basics -> Provisioning -> Allow User initiated updates"

Additional buzzwords following:
com.ibm.notes.branding/enable.update.ui=true, plugin_customization.ini, 8.0.2, install, update, updatesite

Thanks to Henning Kunz, where I finaly found this.