Lately, Notes has been getting some visibility as the client of choice for David Allen of Getting Things Done fame. David was nice enough to present at Lotusphere, showing how he uses Notes to get things done. This has sparked some interest in using Notes outside of a corporate environment where one's email comes from a POP or IMAP server. While Notes is not tailored to getting email from Post Office Protocol (POP) or Internet Message Access Protocol (IMAP) servers, it is certainly possible, so I thought I would share how you can do this.
There are really two audiences that would be interested in this post. They are those that are new to Notes and would like to also use it for reading emails from their personal email accounts, and those that are already using Notes in a corporate environment and would like to add a personal email account. The two implementations have different caveats, so I'll deal with them one at a time.
If you are installing a Notes client so that you can read your email and run a Notes application like eproductivity™ to get things done, the experience can be different than working with other applications that just do email. I'll take you through setting up Notes to get mail from a POP mail server.
Once you've installed Notes and initially launched the application, the configuration wizard will start, asking you for the information necessary to get to your mail server. The first screen is below. It's important to understand that Notes does much more than just email. Because of that, some of things on these screens make less sense to the average email user. If you don't know what a Domino server or Replication schedules are, don't worry, you don't need to. Just click .
The next screen asks you for your name and your Domino server. This can throw some folks, but if you're using Notes for email and running local aplications (i.e., those apps that are not housed on Domino server), then you can just enter your name and uncheck .
The next screen asks you about what servers you'd like to connect to. You want to check , here. The connection type is, most likely, going to be
. Modem is only for when you use a modem to dial directly into the mail server. Most folks that use modems, nowadays, connect to their Internet Service Provider (ISP)with their modems, and then use a Local Area Network (LAN) connection to do things like get email and browse the internet. So, even, if you have a dial-up connection, you'll choose
, here. You don't need to check
. The defaults will be fine, and you'll see where you can change them later, in the next section.
The next screen asks for the specifics around the mail server that we checked off in the previous one. There are two protocols used to retrieve messages off most internet mail servers. They are POP and IMAP. The main difference between these is that POP is set up for reading email from one mail client and IMAP is set up for reading mail from multiple mail clients. With POP, you download messages to your mail client and work with them there. You can choose to leave a copy of the messages on the POP server, but it is just that; a copy. This means that when I work with messages on my mail client and then go back and access the POP mail server from a browser or another mail client, anything that I've done (e.g., read messages, delete messages, or move messages to folders) with the first mail client won't be reflected on the POP server. It be like I never did anything previously. The messages on the server will be unaffected. It's analogous to copying a document from one folder on my PC to another and editing it. When I go back to the original folder and access the document it will be unedited. IMAP is more like synchronization. Every time I send and receive mail, any changes that I've made with my client (e.g., read messages, delete messages, or move messages to folders), will be synchronized back up to the mail server. This way, if I access it from another client I don't have to delete the same messages again or mark them as read or move them to folders. POP is good if I have a limit to the amount of mail that I can keep on the server and want to use one client to transfer them to the mail client on my PC where there is no limit. IMAP is good if I want to use more than one mail client to access the mail on my server. Many internet mail servers are capable of using both protocols, so you have the choice of how you want to work with your mail. AOL®, GMail™, Yahoo!® Mail, and Windows Live™ Hotmail all allow you to use either POP or IMAP to get your mail to a mail client.
In this example, I've chosen POP to access mail on my Internet Service Provider's (ISP's) mail server. The account name defaults to . You can choose a different name, but it only matters if you have more than one that you're dealing with. I'll go over why that might matter in the next section. The "Incoming mail server" is the Internet Protocol (IP) address of the mail server. Notes needs to know where to retrieve the mail from and this address tells it where that is. You can find out the IP address of your mail server from the mail provider's web page.
The next screen tells Notes how to log in to your mail server to get the mail. You need your , which is usually your email address without the "@isp.com" at the end. You also need to enter and re-enter your password (to verify the spelling). Some ISPs require a secure connection to access your mail. Secure Sockets Layer (SSL) encrypts the data over the wire so that others can't read your mail as it is being transferred over the internet.
The next screen tells Notes how to send messages through your mail server. The Simple Message Transfer Protocol (SMTP) is used to send mail. This is the server that routes your mail to the desired recipient by keeping a directory of mail domains and sending the mail to the correct server. For example, the SMTP server knows where to send email that ends with "@aol.com" as opposed to "@companyname.com". The is an IP address that can be found on your mail provider's web site.
The last configuration screen is the email address that others will see when they get mail from you. When they reply to messages that you've sent, the replies will be correctly routed to your mail.
Once you've clicked , your mail will be ready to use in Notes. You will be able to open Mail in Notes and work with your mail. To send and receive mail, you just need to click on the Send/Receive Mail icon
on the toolbar located at the top of your mail in Notes.
Clicking on this icon retrieves the mail from your server and sends any messages that you have created. Your Inbox may not be refreshed to see the new messages right away. If you don't see your messages, you can press the F9 key to refresh your Inbox. The status of sending and receiving mail can be found on the Replication page in Notes. You can find this by clicking on Open -> Replication. This terminology is different from other mail applications because Notes has the additonal capability of synchronizing other applications (e.g., discussion forums, and customer relationship management applications) locally. Your Replication page will look something like this:
You can see, here, the name given to the account name in the configuration wizard; "Receive Internet mail". If you had more than one email account, there would be two entries (e.g., "ISP Mail" and "Hotmail") here. The Last Run column will show you last time you successfully received your email and the Summary column shows you how many messages were received and sent. If there was a problem connecting to your mail provider, you'd see it here. You can also set up a schedule to send and receive email, here. When you click on , you can choose how often to send and receive mail. The dialog box for scheduling updates is below. The term "Replicate" is synonymous with Send/Receive for the purposes of mail.
The second implementation deals with the idea of adding a personal account to your corporate Notes mail file. To do this, you need to add a mail account in Notes. Open up your Contacts and choose Advanced from the navigation (i.e., left) pane. Once there, choose New-> Account. The fields to populate are the same as those from the configuration wizard.
The Protocol Configuration tab is where you can choose whether or not to leave a copy of your mail on the POP server. Notes leaves a copy on the server, by default.
When adding a personal mail account to your corporate Notes mail there are a couple of things to consider. First, understand that your personal mail comes into your corporate Inbox. The same is true for multiple personal email accounts. All the mail goes into the same Inbox. Also, if you replicate your mail from a local replica back to your corporate mail server, your personal mail will be replicated to your corporate email on your corporaate server too. This can be avoided by adding Mail Rules and edting the replication options, but that is a subject for another post to this blog.
Dwight Morse | 13 May 2009 11:20:55 PM ET | | Comments (38)
