On 05/24/2018 11:08 AM, Grant Taylor via cctalk wrote:
Though I've got to say, I think the absolute very BEST online / offline
email client integration that I've ever seen was Lotus Notes and Domino.
(I'll send a follow up email with details as to why I was /so/
impressed.)
I was EXTREMELY impressed with how well Lotus Notes worked as an email
client for Lotus Domino when it came to online / offline use.
First: I had Notes configured to replicate my email (DB) off of the
Domino server so that I could have access to it even if I was offline.
I don't recall how Notes behaved if I transitioned between online /
offline in the event of a network (dis)connection. (It rarely
happened.) But I was easily able to change the so called "Location"
from "Online" to "Offline" (or any other location that I defined) on the
fly with absolute minimal impact by clicking a drop down and selecting a
different location.
The most likely small burp would be if I naively left it in the Online
location when starting up without the company VPN connected, thus unable
to communicate with the Domino server. In such a case, Notes might take
15 ~ 30 additional seconds to open as it tried to connect before it
would give up trying to connect and say "Unable to connect to server,
starting in Offline mode." I could easily start the VPN after the fact
and switch to "Online" mode and do a Replicate (what Notes termed the
Send & Receive).
I could easily draft email while offline and it would sit in my outbox
waiting for the next time I replicated.
IMHO it worked great.
Aside: I had this same type of behavior for other non-Mail DBs inside
of Notes too. My employer used a LOT of Notes DBs for various things.
Vacation planner was a Notes DB. Inventory was a Notes DB. Team
documentation repositories were Notes DBs. Each team have a different
document repository (Team Room) Notes DB. Different people had
different levels of access to different DBs.
Further Aside: I could easily enable DB level encryption of the local
replica of a Notes DB trivially. I could also turn encryption off or
change security level easily.
*ALL* of my Notes DBs benefited from these (and more) features;
replication, online / offline, encryption, meta data indexing, full text
indexing, and many more.
Second: The thing that I did with my email that was *SO* impressive to
me was that my email DB on my workstation was a replica of my email DB
on the Domino server. With the exception that my server replica was <
300 MB (disk quota) and my local workstation replica > 2 GB. — Yes,
the same DB had bidirectional replication between > 2 GB and < 300 MB.
This is what amazed me.
I configured custom replication between the my workstation and the
server such that:
1) Deletes from the server copy were not replicated into my workstation
copy.
2) The server copy only maintained messages that were < 30 days old.
(I needed to replicate within that window, but 30 days is not a
problem.)
3) ALL modifications to the local copy were replicated to the server copy.
This allowed me to use my email like I had no disk quota at all. (Based
on amount of storage on my workstation.) I could leave all my messages
in my mailbox /with/ attachments left in tact. (Many colleagues removed
attachments form messages to shrink their inbox. I didn't have that
problem.) All the while I was able to stay well under the 300 MB disk
quota and stay out of "Mail Jail".
As an added bonus, I was able to leverage the company provided web mail
interface and access the email that was still on the server (within the
30 day window). Anything I sent / received / marked as (un)read would
get replicated into my workstation copy the next time I replicated.
In my (not so) humble opinion, Lotus Notes & Domino has got to be, hands
down, the absolute BEST replicated email infrastructure that I've ever seen.
I do think the UI was fairly ugly and somewhat clunky. That being said,
I was able to do compose email / team documents with features that I
LONG for in Gmail.
In hind sight I would have liked to have a tiny Domino server (which
Notes was in some ways) that was an IMAP / SMTP interface for a local
copy of Thunderbird. - I think that would have given me the
aforementioned features /and/ what I considered to be a better UI.
--
Grant. . . .
unix || die
