Administration

Recently I did some long overdue changes to my Domino infrastucture. Many years ago, when I initially setup my Domino server, I put it in the domain /Martinsson, since my domain at that time was martinsson.com (as well as martinsson.net). The server was just for practice and fun initially, but I ended up doing more and more.

In 2013, when my wife Christina and I started a small business, I added additional internet domains to the server. Our business Demand Better Solutions strated getting some traction, and I changed my email address from karl-henry@martinsson.com to karl-henry@demandbettersolutions.com. But I kept having issues with the outgoing email. Often people did not get my emails since they ended up in their spam folder. I figured that it had something to do with the domain

It was time to bite the bullet and do something. I decided earlier this year that I would setup a server from scratch, on a new hosting service. I arranged hosting with Prominic, a company specializing in high quality Domino hosting. The account was setup in no time and the Domino server was ready to be configured. My new Domino domain would from now on be /DBS.

I am not a stranger to installing and configuring Domino servers, but I decided have a real administrator set up it up for me, to get everything perfect..This way I would hopefully also learn something. Another reason I wanted some help had to do with setting up cross-certifications with my old server in the old domain. My plan was as follows:

• Set up the new server
• Cross-certify the two servers and admin accounts
• Replicate over all databases from the old server to the new
• Update the ACL on all databases and remove references to the old server
• Delete the old server and all data files
• Install a second Domino server in the new /DBS domain
• Set up replication between the two servers (on different hosts)

I was lucky enough to get help from one of the best, Lifetime IBM Champion Gabriella Davis from The Turtle Partnership. If you need high quality admin help or advice, with Domino or IBM Connections, Gab is outsanding.

Gab helped me set everything up on the new server, I replicated everything, fixed the ACL settings and deleted the old server. The build of the secondary new server went off without any issues, which is not surprising when you consider the stability and maturity of the Domino server platform.

I updated all DNS settings, replicated all databases to the second server, and I was ready to rock’n’roll.

Everything worked well for a while, until I noticed that some email services still categorized a number of my emails (but not all of them) as spam. I did some research and realized that I never changed the SPF record for my domain to point to the correct mail server.

SPF is a email validation system, it works similar to a DNS lookup. When a mail from my domain arrives at a mail server, it performs a lookup to get my SPF record. This record, which is just a plain text string, describes which server(s) are allowed to send mail on behalf of my domain. If the server connecting to the mail server is listed in the SPF record, the email is accepted.

I updated the SPF record, and everything now works perfectly.

This is just another example of how powerful but still easy to use IBM Domino is as a server. The only issues I had were external ones, not related to Domino. Kudos to IBM (as well as the original developers at Iris) for building such a robust and still easy to use platform.

The company I work for is owned by a large multinational corporation, and we are one of the few places not using Outlook/Exchange, but Lotus Notes. We have a substantial investment in custom applications written for the Notes platform, and with the deep integration between applications and email, we want to stay on the platform.

However, earlier this year, a threat against Lotus Notes reared it’s ugly head. Executives at my company were sent meeting invitations from Outlook by other executives in other companies in the group. Some executives received the invitatiosn fine, and could accept/decline, while other got just a plain text email or even blank email. I was tasked to research this, and it seems to be an issue on the sending side. If the sender have the recipients address in their Outlook contacts, the invitation is sent in one format (rich text), if the recipient is not found, it is sent as MIME. So the mail with the invitation is sent in different format by Exchange, with different MIME types (text/calendar vs. text/plain).

It is actually easy to replicate the issue. Send a meeting invitation from Outlook to a Notes user not/never listed in the Outllok contacts. It comes across perfectly:

Then add that same address to the Outlook contacts and send another invitation. It comes across as a balnk mail, with only the message disclaimer from Exchange visible:

There is an IBM technote about this, but there is no solution listed. IBM simply suggest contacting Microsoft. There is a workaround, but that involves all Outlook users changing the default outgoing mail format from rich text to plain text, or to edit this on each single contact. I even had a couple of users here (who also had Outlook mail accounts) try that. It worked in some cases, but not always. And this is not going to work, thousands of users (or at least several dozen executives) will not make all those changes just to accomodate a small Lotus Notes shop like us…

I am continuing to look for a solution, but it has to be one that we can implement on the Domino mail server(s) here. I found a suggestion to add TNEFEnableConversion=1 to notes.ini, I am having my administrator implement that right now, so we will see if that helps. But if that does not fix it, or I can’t come up with some way to process the incoming meeting invitations and fix the MIME type, I can see a number of executives working really hard on getting rid of Notes (at least for mail) here. And that will happen soon…

So, anyone got any ideas?

Update 08/07/2014: I found out that TNEFEnableConversion=1 was already enabled on our mail server, and had been for several years. It seems to also be related to winmail.dat being attached to incoming Outlook mail. I have opened a support ticket with IBM as well.

Update 2 08/07/2014: Within a couple of hours I got the following response from IBM regarding my support ticket (PMR 91606,004,000):

The TNEFEnableConversion=1 parameter was created to extract attachments from a winmail.dat file using the conversion process.  However, this is only used to extract attachments within emails.  This parameter is not intended to extract calendaring information.  The TNEF converter detaches the winmail.dat file, scans it looking for object types that indicate there is file attachment data present, and extracts the data as needed.

According to the RFC standards for SMTP calendaring (icalendar), messages must be formatted in MIME and not MS Rich Text.  As such, this issue is considered a third party bug by our development team because the
MS Rich Text format generates winmail.dat attachments which do not comply with the RFC standards for calendaring.

 At this time, there is no way to address this issue on the Domino side. However, the development is considering in creating an enhancement request not a fix because the issue relies on Exchange/Outlook. The functionality is expected to be in the next release of Domino version 9.0.2.

Meeting invites sent in an HTML or Plain text format work just fine with external applications such as Notes/Domino.

 This sounds promising, now it is just a question how long we have to wait, and if the executives are going to want to wait.