How Do I Hate Thee? Let Me Count The Ways…

Lotus Notes must die. It was pushed onto us when we got bought out by our parent company and we had to integrate with their e-mail system, and it’s come to be universally loathed around the office. Outlook/Exchange had their own fair share of problems, but at least they were well-known and livable.

Among Notes’ many crimes against humanity are:

1) Date confusion. Instead of displaying the date on recent e-mails, it will say either ‘Today’ or ‘Yesterday.’ The problem is, it continues to say ‘Today’ on e-mails that are now three or four days old, even after refreshing the list.

2) It makes anything other than top posting extremely painful. Like many others, I prefer the mixed quoting style, where the original e-mail is broken up into chunks and followed by my responses.

Notes, however, treats the original message almost like an attachment, tacking it on to the bottom of the reply in its own special way. It looks like an exact copy of the original message and there’s no additional formatting to it, so if I try to insert my responses in the mixed quote fashion it looks like my text was actually part of the original message. It also lets you use a control to hide the original message, which would cause my responses to disappear with it. In order to achieve the proper mixed quote effect, you have to manually copy, paste, and format the chunks you want.

3) Deletion is a two-step process, where you first have to mark the e-mail for deletion and then refresh to actually delete it. That’s not too bad, but then there’s no way to easily mark large numbers of e-mails. The usual click-then-shift-click doesn’t work on the e-mail list.

4) The integrated calendar function has silly defaults. It wouldn’t give me the usual 10-minute warning before meetings until I went into the settings and explicitly set it to do so, whereas you’d normally expect that to be on by default.

5) Non-intuitive GUI elements. Double-click an attachment and it opens, as expected, but double-click the text of an e-mail and instead of highlighting the current word, you’re now editing the e-mail! Why would I want to change an e-mail that someone else sent me? Also, as noted above, lists don’t behave the way standard list controls do; shift-clicking adds or removes individual entries from the selection when that’s normally handled by control-clicking, and control-clicking does nothing.

6) If you see a URL in an e-mail, there is no right-click option to copy it so you can paste it into a browser, so you have to manually select it. The right-click option that sounds like it *should* do that (Copy As Document Link), doesn’t. Watch out though, misclick slightly and you’ll open it within the internal browser instead…

7) And the internal browser is just awful. It might just be embedded IE for all I know, but whatever they’re doing to it, it’s extremely sluggish and generates more errors and problems than standalone IE does.

I’m sure there are many other problems that I’m mentally suppressing at the moment.

There were other problems I’ve had that have been fixed in recent versions, at least (e.g., getting a new mail beep but having to refresh manually before it would show up), so they’re improving. Slowly.

“But it’s more than just an e-mail client, it’s a database with the power to blah blah blah…” the apologists claim, but I don’t care. It may have all that additional flexibility, but when it’s pushed onto us for the singular purpose of handling e-mail, I want it to be *good* at that one task.