SearchDomino: Advice sought re lack of Notes/Outlook interoperability

November 3 2005

SearchDomino has a story today about an organization running a hosted messaging environment, using Domino 6.5 and Outlook clients.  Apparently, they're having problems with POP3 errors.

According to Frank, someone at the hosting service told him, "Notes and Outlook do not work well together."...

What Frank wants to know is this: Is what he was told by the hosting service true? Do Outlook and Notes NOT work well together? Yes, he knows the literature on both the Lotus and Microsoft sites says the two products should interoperate just fine. But Frank says, "I would prefer to hear from an expert working in the field rather than marketing literature."
Link: SearchDomino: Advice sought re lack of Notes/Outlook interoperability >

Ed Brill Highland Park, IL USA Category:  In the news  Add/View Comments [17]

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  1. 1  Chris Whisonant http://cwhisonant.blogspot.com | 11/3/2005 2:51:12 PM

    Sounds like they need to call Lotus tech support. We allow a few users to use POP3 (mostly the Macs....) and we haven't had issues with it. In theory, Domino and Outlook are using a standard protocol to talk via POP3. I would say that what he was told is not true but more perception of two competing companies who "don't play well together" in general.

  1. 2  Paul Penoske http://www.deltechsolutions.com | 11/3/2005 3:31:26 PM

    At a shop with 10,000+ users globally, we've run 2000+ users Outlook/POP on a centralized Domino (R5/R6 on AS400). Few issues (POP Task failed a few times). Those 2000 pop users have since been migrated to R6 client. We are now planning on adding 6,000 POP users in 1Q2006 to R7/AIX.

  1. 3  Carl Tyler http://www.iminstant.com | 11/3/2005 4:15:37 PM

    The only problem I saw with Outlook hitting a Domino Server for POP3 mail was if you left the mail on the server. Eventually Outlook would start to retrieve all the mail again, even though it already had it. I never investigated if this was a Domino or Outlook "feature"

  1. 4  Eric Parsons startingblockcomputing.com | 11/3/2005 4:19:04 PM

    I can only describe second hand, but a client with a single R5 server ran Domino IMAP with Outlook Express clients. The Win2K server needed rebooted fairly often, and the performance was indicating the need for more resources or less clients.

    All in all, it was not the software, but the hardware that was having difficulty. I can imagine that ND7 on 400 or AIX would be very solid for any valid client.

  1. 5  Jon Johnston http://bingo.cbsol.com | 11/3/2005 5:19:43 PM

    We have seen specific problems with Outlook 2003 being used as a POP client to Domino, but that was over a year ago. Detailed it on my blog at the time:

    { Link }

    If they're getting 550 errors, which are non-delivery errors with Outlook, I'd say they have other issues beyond Outlook. Also - from the inference in the article, they do not specific whether it is Microsoft Outlook, or Outlook Express, and when you're dealing with these issues, people tend to confuse the two.

  1. 6  Jon Johnston http://bingo.cbsol.com | 11/3/2005 5:24:33 PM

    Here's the key to this article: "E-mail delivery got so bad at one point that Frank's employees began to tell customers that if they were sending an important e-mail, they should either call ahead and let the recipient know that, or else fax or Fedex it."

    In other words, the 550 errors were coming on inbound delivery, not because of POP3 clients. 550 errors would have been generated because of the way relaying was setup, probably (obvious assumption on my part) because of how Domino's POP/SMTP relaying controls were configured. I seriously doubt this had a darned thing to do with Outlook, but when you're doing support, telling someone that there's a problem between two vendors seems like a believable solution. It's much better than admitting you had a problem youself. Ha!!!!

  1. 7  David Jones http://dbjones.blogspot.com/ | 11/3/2005 5:28:56 PM

    We had some problems with that when people didn't set their outgoing authentication to be the same as incoming.

  1. 8  David Bell  | 11/4/2005 2:15:44 AM

    Had the following interesting POP discoveries recently with Domino 7 relating to read/unread status.

    POP3_Read_All=1

    Forces the Domino POP3 server to present all available Inbox message identifiers to the POP3 client regardless of unread status. This puts the responsibility for determining what is new onto the client. If the mail profile is changed and the client-managed list (UIDL) is lost, any mail in the account will be downloaded again. If this is not set, reading a message with DWA causes the server not to present the message to the POP client.

    POP3MarkRead=2

    Provide an option for POP3 to only mark mail messages as "read" if the content is actually retrieved via the POP3 server. Prior to this change, if the Notes.ini setting for POP3MarkRead had any non-zero value, the POP3 server would mark a message as read any time the POP3 server opened the message, even if just to satisfy the POP3 LIST command. Now, by setting POP3MarkRead=2, the POP3 server will only mark messages as read if the content is retrieved by the POP3 client (e.g. via the TOP or RETR command).

  1. 9  Ben Rose http://www.jaffacake.net | 11/4/2005 3:18:32 AM

    Back to basics here...why are they using POP3?

    What's wrong with using Domino Web Access for MS Outlook? This allows full functionality of the Outlook client, so mail as well as calendar. It was purpose built by Lotus for this task and, in my testing, works suprisingly well. Also, as email will replicate with the server nicely you end up with a nice backup of your emails and folders on the server.

    Back to POP3, you download the email and it's just local...yuck. At least use IMAP.

    Tell the customer to look into DWA for MS Outlook.

  1. 10  Ben Rose http://www.jaffacake.net | 11/4/2005 3:20:04 AM

    IBM Lotus® Domino® Access for Microsoft® Outlook delivers the leading messaging, calendar and scheduling, and personal information management services of Lotus Domino to Microsoft Outlook users.

    { Link }

  1. 11  David Vasta david.davidandkelly.com | 11/4/2005 10:24:12 AM

    We also have a select number of user that use the :: IBM Lotus® Domino® Access for Microsoft® Outlook here and it works great. A little slow the first time but after that it's like butter!

  1. 12  Paul Robichaux http://www.e2ksecurity.com | 11/4/2005 10:55:50 AM

    @9: or failing that, for Pete's sake at least use IMAP. I'm always amazed by the number of people who want to use the antiquated POP protocol and then complain when they run into its limitations.

  1. 13  Ben Rose http://www.jaffacake.net | 11/4/2005 12:15:13 PM

    @9 IMAP? There's an echo in here ;O)

  1. 14  David Bell  | 11/4/2005 12:51:54 PM

    I'm working with a customer now who is migrating to Domino 7. They have 50,000 users, mixed IMAP and POP. We can migrate the backend without forcing users to switch clients. That is one of the main reasons.

  1. 15  Chris Miller http://www.IdoNotes.com | 11/4/2005 3:29:37 PM

    I went ahead and had to do an entire posting, I had too much to say for comments.

    { Link }

  1. 16  Philip Storry http://www.not-so-rapid.com | 11/7/2005 2:47:06 AM

    David Bell [14],

    "I'm working with a customer now who is migrating to Domino 7. They have 50,000 users, mixed IMAP and POP. We can migrate the backend without forcing users to switch clients."

    Sorry, but I'm going to have to call you on that one. That's just not an acceptable reason.

    I had a whole boatload of users running R4.x clients whilst talking to an R5 server. Later, I did the same with R5 clients and an R6 server. In my current job, we only finished rolling out the R6.5 client six months ago - yet the servers had been running R6.5 for well over a year. So that's at least a year of R5 clients talking to a three-server R6.5 mail cluster.

    One of the nice things about Domino/Notes is that you can always migrate the backend without forcing the client to upgrade. You just don't upgrade the user's mail databases to the latest template. It's that simple.

    In fact, as far as I'm aware, even Exchange Server doesn't require the client to be upgraded just because you upgraded your server.

    Whilst POP3 and IMAP may give flexibility in which client you use, they don't have anything to do with whether or not you have to upgrade that client. Just about every mail client has a "sell by date", past which the vendor/author won't be willing or able to support it. (Yes, even the BSD/GPL et al licensed ones - the timescale may be longer, but it's still there.)

    So you should plan to upgrade your mail client eventually. In my experience, if you don't assume that you will have to upgrade (any software, not just a mail client) you're just shuffling the costs from the "we know about it and it's scheduled" column to the "AAARGH! It's a crisis" column. And the latter column is the one where it looks bad, and is more likely to affect your budget badly.

    Now, in your case, you're working with a customer, so you have less choice. But I still can't let you get away with such flimsy reasoning... ;-)

  1. 17  David Bell  | 11/8/2005 8:29:27 PM

    Call me if you like. As I remember the original point was that there is no good reason for using POP and IMAP with Domino. I beg to differ.

    I am not talking about a corporate customer and they do NOT, and cannot, mandate which client a user uses. ALL of their current clients are POP and IMAP on both Windows and Mac. They CAN recommend which clients are preferred, and Notes/DWA will be offered in that space alongside POP and IMAP.

    When I say "upgrade to Domino 7" I am not talking about "from a previous Domino version" but another mail system altogether. Maybe that misled you a little, sorry if it did.

    Reasoning still flimsy ?