Lotus Notes 8 Update — IBM responds
When we first tested Lotus Notes 8 we were using the readily accessible POP/IMAP version of the service. Although we did not know it at the time, there is a very significant difference between that version and Lotus Notes running on Domino Server.
A representative from IBM contacted us very soon after the Email Standards Project site launched to let us know, and we updated the results with a message explaining the version we tested on. We’ve been in conversation with IBM since then, and wanted to keep you all up to date with the situation.
Lotus Notes (Domino Server) vs Lotus Notes (POP/IMAP)
As you can see in these partial screenshots, the Domino server version renders much closer to our Acid Test. IBM tells us that almost 90% of their customers are using Lotus Notes 8 with Domino Server, which use Internet Explorer for HTML email rendering when viewing emails. This is great news! Your subscribers on Notes may be getting a better experience than previously thought.
However, 10% of (a very large number) is still a lot of people, and since there is not any immediate way to know which version any person is using, you can’t necessarily rest easy. IBM tell us that there is internal attention being paid to this issue, and that there is a push on to have the POP version improve support in a future version. There are no promises yet that this will actually happen, but they are listening, and the Email Standards Project has made an impact.
So our thanks to IBM for their responsiveness, and their willingness to be open to discussion on this, even if they are not able to make changes immediately. We look forward to continuing the conversation. Now if we could just find someone from Gmail with the same approach…
Okay, so 90% of Notes 8 users use it through a Domino Server, but how many Notes users are actually on Notes 8? And does 6.5/7 do as well on the acid test as 8 did?
I used to work in Notes development in a large company, and we were still on 6.0 when 8.0 was coming out - 6.0 was pretty much already being EOLd by IBM. There were plans to move to 7 soon, but I doubt 8 would be thought about for another few years.
So might be worth testing against older versions of Notes/Domino that actually match what is out there in the wild -unfortunately it IS a significant number of email users.
Thanks Marcin,
We actually did check against 6.5 as well - in the original report you will see this note:
It should be noted that while the application GUI of versions 6.5 and 8 differ significantly, the actual email-message windows and how they display content is virtually the same. In fact, while reviewing our acid test in Lotus Notes 8, we only noticed one improvement from 6.5: support for width.
With the Email Standards Project we are really trying to focus on improving current and future generations of email clients - we don’t expect the developers to go back and fix older versions, it is just impractical. So the key is to know where we are right now, and where we need to get to.
As a Notes client user for pop3/imap for the last 10 years I would like to understand what the issue is. Rarely do I have any issues with email that comes in HTML format or any other.
While I agree if you have a demo email with various pieces and parts of html and other code you would expect it to always look the same, but visual rendering has at times been a problem, from WYSIWYG to bidirectional languages online to operating system issues, aside from the mail client you may be testing.
I am sure Lotus recognized your thoughts and provided good feedback or a plan of time to implement the changes.
While I notice the differences as outlined in your review, they are to me, as an end user, irrelevant for the most part.
However, as an advertising or marketing executive I can understand the need for accuracy in text, look and feel.
In the end, if I choose NOT to load images, as I often do, then many of your points are moot. As long as I can read the text, it makes little difference to me how it appears.
My biggest concern here, is as said above: How many is REALLY on Notes 8?
Too be honest, all the companies I work up against are ALL on lower version, hell 2 of them (BIG companies) are using 6.5.3, which renders like a back alley kid.
I understand that not much can be done there, but a patch could help I suppose…
Christiaan “Calen”
@Keith
In the end, if I choose NOT to load images, as I often do, then many of your points are moot. As long as I can read the text, it makes little difference to me how it appears.
That’s fair enough, but if you see our actual test results, not loading background images but still supporting some CSS can leave you with unreadable text.
It is more about having consistency and modern, lightweight HTML that means designers can send you email and be able to rely on you being able to read it.
@Christiaan
As I mentioned above, 6.5 had pretty much the same problems, but things will only get better for current or future versions. It does mean that some (perhaps most) current users won’t get any benefits, but we will at least be moving in the right direction.
Matthew,
Ah, I see this is about spammers then. Because my internal designers code emails to work with Domino mail natively of course. Then test it on standard browsers as a secondary benefit to outside partners and clients.
Would CSS make for more beautiful and nicer looking emails, sure it would. But our developers are not UI people so it’s another cost and for internal use, most don’t care to bother.
If they would spend the time to make these enhanced emails it would be beneficial and maybe that is a direction to think about as well when UI comes into play with new apps.
But my corp mail gets few ads that get through spam traps and virus checks and so mails i get are ones I want and as I said I rarely have issues with them.
If you are using an older client, MS Mail, Netscape mail, Notes 5 or Outlook 2000 or anything else the newer version will always be more standard based and functional.
So if you are doing this to get companies to upgrade to Notes R8 then I am all for your work and promoting it.
“If you are using an older client, MS Mail, Netscape mail, Notes 5 or Outlook 2000 or anything else the newer version will always be more standard based and functional.”
Whaaaa?!?!
This isn’t always true. In fact, in the last year, we had the biggest case of a client developer taking a step BACKWARDS when it comes to standards compliance and functionality. Perhaps you heard of it? It’s called “Outlook 2007”.
Ben,
You misunderstand Microsoft, they met their compliance and functionality requirements.
Your organization doesn’t sunscribe to their standards organization?
LOL
I initially wrote a length message about why standards in e-mail are needed because they will: A) decrease guess work in trying to make one design work for ‘nearly all’ but then come up with an odd issue regarding an oddly behaving rendering.
and B) significantly decrease the amount of code that goes into the e-mail, thus increasing efficiency.
However, from looking at your business’s website and your overall attitude, I believe such arguments would simply fall on deaf ears.
Not deaf ears, I do understand it, been working with email systems since the mid 80’s.
But I am not the coder or the product manager behind it, just on the front lines supporting it and using it.
And of course pro-Lotus.
@Keith
Matthew,
Ah, I see this is about spammers then. Because my internal designers code emails to work with Domino mail natively of course. Then test it on standard browsers as a secondary benefit to outside partners and clients.
I really don’t think you are understanding what this project is about, or what email standards mean Keith.
It has absolutely nothing to do with spammers at all. Email senders should not have to code their emails to work differently for different mail clients.
Spammers don’t care about web standards at all, they are going to keep sending whatever they want.
Honestly, the development of Lotus Notes 8 consider a BIG different where it has many UI and widgets features compare with existing version that my company using, which still 5.
However, I’m still interesting to know the question being asked, “How many Notes 8 users?”
Thanks for doing this work. As a long-time email administrator (both Microsoft and Lotus) I’ve always struggled with the lack of standards in internet emails. Between TNEF and OLE and SMIME and HTML, it’s been a nightmare.
I find that HTML probably offers the best hope, but as you have shown, all the mail readers need to behave the same and they don’t.
I give IBM credit for at least being responsive. They have improved HTML rendering through every major release and it’s good that you have lit this fire under them to get them to finally (hopefully) perfect it.
I work for one of the world’s largest ad agencies where pretty much everything we use, from our mac pro desktops to our Adobe software is bang up-to-date.
Unfortunately when it comes to our officially sanctioned mail client, we’re still on Notes version 6.5. Suffice to say that it renders html like ns4 on crack. Worse still, we are forced to make all html mail conform to this crack-smoking standard.
This requirement has driven all of our developers, at one time or another, to the brink of serial-killing insanity.
What wonderful work you are taking on here! I can only think of the money that we could have saved our clients had Lotus Notes supported standards...and the future money that will be saved by this project.
I can remember one client who was sending a monthly HTML newsletter to a recipient list of 100% Lotus Notes users. The hours and hours we had to spend sending tests to 3 or 4 recipients, receiving back screenshots, adjusting code, round and round we go, all the while learning one more thing about how LN rendered.
I’m not sure I was brought to the brink of serial-killing insanity, but I certainly had a few choice words fly out of my mouth.
Lotus Notes 8 sounds great - where can I download a copy?
Does anybody test Lotus Notes 8 on Win98 PC?
Hi John,
You may check out IBM Lotus Notes 8 website to get more info.
Hi all,
Bravo to the Email Standards crew - what an excellent initiative and well worth supporting.
John - Lotus Notes 8 can be downloaded as an evaluation copy from here - http://www.ibm.com/developerworks/downloads/ls/lsndad/?S_TACT=105AGX28&S_CMP=TRIALS.
As an IBM Partner with a lot of experience in Notes, we’re very happy that Notes Domino 8 is producing a more accurate representation of HTML email. Our process for designing newsletters and email campaigns for Notes recipients involved lots of tables.....and then more tables! That’s about all you could really get away with. Anything else and Notes would do some very interesting interpretations of our HTML.
All 23k employees at our shop are still on 6.5.4. So, sadly, we have to design for it. The upside? Looks excellent everywhere else with minimal work. Not a lot of opportunity to use CSS, but since everyone in our group hadn’t really done emails before we got here, there wasn’t really any unlearning to do.
We’ve got it down to a few minor annoyances.
(1) Adds one pixel to the edge of our outer-container table of our brand new design. (And since it’s got rounded edges and floats on a bed of gray, that means a single line extending up past the edge of the corner. Annoying, but livable since most of our audience is on free or ISP email addresses and are viewing with a more standard web or email client.)
(2) If there’s any italics, it adds an extra space after the italics are turned off.
(3) If there’s any italics on a line of text and that text would otherwise come right up to the edge of the table, that extra space causes Notes to chop off the last character of text instead of just wrapping the word.
(4) Doesn’t leave a blank line after you close off an unordered list. (About once a month we have to send someone a screen grab because they ask for a blank line during their final pre-launch review.)
My day job still uses Notes 7 (desktop app) on the majority of its clients and has a ton of problems when rendering e-mails.
Using iNotes (the webmail version) on any IE client (doesn’t work well on mozilla) displays something more acceptable.
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Hi this is raju pls tell me Lotus notse R6 and R8 difference...like functions amd scripts.......i have some r6 applications now iam ready to migrating r8..any sugestions....
Hi Raju,
There is a few differences - outlining them here would be too much so here is a link to the IBM site that may help somewhat:
http://www-128.ibm.com/developerworks/lotus/library/ls-NDHistory/
I had no idea that notes was this popular or dependable. Interesting....
I would say “widely deployed” is a more accurate term than “popular.” Dependable isn’t the right choice, either.
Very good points, Lotus Notes exists and is widely distributed, but I don’t think it’s truly used by choice and more/less mandated by Corporations, etc. for their employees…
It’s worth checking out Notes 8 which offers a much better interface and a lot more features than Outlook. Sametime (IBM’s instant messaging software) is integrated as part of the email client, and you can do some pretty cool stuff with the sidebar - things like RSS feeds, widgets, etc. With some smart development, it easily outperforms Outlook (and works out cheaper too). It’s all based on the Eclipse platform, so there’s no proprietary lock-in.
I totally agree with you Christmas, including me and all the companies i have ever worked in!
I have some issues regarding lotus notes 8.0. I am not sure this is the right place to post it.
Query - Trademark™ symbol is not getting render in Lotus Notes8.0 Email Client
I am using
1. Email Client – Lotus notes 8.0
2. Application - C# (VS Studio 2005)
In order to generate Trademark Symbol we are using it’s corresponding hex value #x2122;.
For IE-6.0 IE 7.0, WebPages and Email client - outlook 2003 rendering works fine and appropriate Trademark symbol gets generated.
However if I use lotus notes email client, the trademark symbol doesn’t get rendered and it shows the hex value #x2122; instead of Trademark symbol in email.
Problem occurs for
1. EmailTo Field
2. EmailFrom Field
3. EmailBody Text field
In order to decode the hex value, I have used
Eg: string FromName = HttpUtility.HtmlDecode(emailMessage.FromName)
Does anyone come across such issues?
Thanks in advance
Jayesh