Found a two part article from IBM developer works on how to control spam mails using advanced SMTP settings in Lotus Domino. Written by Edmond Stanton, the article illustrates how to control spam mails by using the Configuration Settings document, server mail rules, and inbound SMTP commands and extensions in Lotus Domino 6 and above.

Should be an interesting read for Domino administrators facing problems with mailbox getting filled with spam mails. Part1 and Part 2 of the article titled Controlling spam: Advanced SMTP settings in Lotus Domino can be found in developer works dated 4th Oct 2004.

Have you ever spent hours in drafting a mail and lost it because your system got crashed? Those of you who had experienced this will appreciate how useful the autosave option is. Lotus Notes client version 7 has this feature included in it, however it is not enabled by default and has to be enabled by users by changing the settings in the user preferences. When Autosave is enabled and if your system or Lotus Notes crashes while drafting a mail, the draft can be recovered without having to start from the scratch. You can assign interval durations at which autosave can happen. To enable this feature go to File - Preferences - User Preferences and in the Basics view enable the Autosave option listed in the Startup Options. Also assign the interval at which the draft must be saved.

What is this Save state feature?
Save state is a feature available in Lotus Notes 7 client where all open tabs when the system is shut down gets opened automatically at next login. This is a pretty cool feature because it helps you open all those tabs at one go without having individually opening them. The best part is that if you once save the state, the tabs open at that instant will be saved and will automatically open every time you login into Lotus Notes unless you clear the saved tab details or overwrite another time by using save windows state option.

You can have any document like mail, calendar entry, a document in a custom application etc. saved and have them open by default in the next Notes login. This helps users save time, particulary those who want several documents in multiple applications to be open at the same time and use them regularly. They dont have to open all applications and open the documents every time, instead they can have it opened once and save the status. All their documents will open by default when they login into Notes every time after that.

Lets check how to enable this feature. Once you are sure that all documents you use regularly are open just click File and click Save Window State. Thats it, all open tabs will be recorded and saved. These documents will open by default in all subsequent Notes login. Iy you want to disable this feature click File and Clear Saved Window State.

Curious to know how the much hyped about Hannover would look like? Take a look at this Demo which gives an idea of how it might look. This is a Conceptual demo and brings out possible features that can be included in Hannover to help improve organizational prodcutivity. However, this is not the final product demo, so features and images shown here may be subjected to change.

The demo runs for a little more than four and a half minutes and takes time to download.So please be a little patient after clicking the link for it to get started.

When a mail is sent to you, the sender can enable Return receipt in the delivery option which will help him/her know that you have read his/her mail. There is no direct means to avoid sending the confirmation message to the sender when you open the mail. Incase you want to avoid triggering the automated reply to the sender but want to have the message read, the way out is to use a simple trick. Just select the mail without opening it, click Reply tab on the action bar and choose Reply with History. A new memo opens as a thread showing the contents of the mail received by you earlier. You can read the message here and can also open any attachment without the sender knowing that you have read the message.

The Lotus Notes Client when installed with default settings will have a tool bar at the top of the Notes view. This will contain useful utility tools such as the Rich text field editing tools, attaching tool, edit, search tool etc. However this tool bar can be enabled or disabled based on individual preferences. Follow the steps below to enable or disable the toolbar.

1. Login into your Lotus Notes account and go to File, Preferences and Toolbar Preferences.
2. In the Basics view, disable the tick mark in the Toolbar display section to hide the Toolbar.
3. Enable the toolbar by marking a tick in the show Toolbar option.
4. You can also edit the toolbar option appearence like whether to display text alone or icons alone or both, the size of the icons etc.
5. choose the desired tool bar settings and click OK to save you references.

When a mail is viewed it appears different for each user based on their mail box design and settings. The most common difference being the width of each line in the mail is different for every user. Web based mails generally tend to have smaller width when compared to Lotus Notes or Outlook. To avoid this when composing a mail we can set the standard width of each line, so that the alignment is more or less the same when opened in any other mail client. To do this follow the steps below.

1. Login into your Lotus Notes account and go to File, Preferences and User Preferences.
2. Click on the mail tab and go the Internet View, the section named Composing Internet-Style Replicas will have an option to wrap each line after a certain number of characters.
3. Choose the number of characters to wrap every line and move to the next line.
4. Click OK and save the settings.

Sometimes we do not check our mail box for a long time when we are busy with some other task. This could result in missing some important notification or message sent to us that has to be acted upon immediately.

To avoid this we can set up Lotus Notes to give an alert when a new mail is received in the inbox. Follow the steps below to enable the alert.

1. Login into your Lotus Notes account and go to File, Preferences and User Preferences.
2. Open the Mail tab, at the general view there is a section called When New Mail Arrives, there you will find options to enable option to Show a Pop-up.
3. Enable the option to get a pop up message everytime a new mail is received.
4. There are additional features such as providing alert with a sound. You can also choose the sound to be played from a file in your system .
5. Click OK and save the settings to get the alert whenever a new mail is received.

You can set your favourite font as your default font when composing the mail in a new memo instead of changing it everytime you compose and send a mail.

Follow the steps below to set a font as default for a new memo.

1. Log into your Lotus Notes account, go to File- Preferences - Edit Preferences.
2. In the Basics view, Display Options section, click Default Fonts tab.
3. You will get a Pop-Up window to choose fonts for various sections. Select the fonts accordingly and Click OK.
4. The change will take effect when Lotus Notes is restarted the next time.
   

We can enable or disable saving a copy of the mail sent in Sent Folder by adjusting the user preferences. By default a mail sent using Lotus Notes will be saved in the Sent Folder, however based on individual requirements we can disable and later enable the facility as required.

Follow the steps below to adjust the settings.

1. Log into your Lotus Notes account and go to File - Preferences - User Preferences
2. Open the Mail view.
3. In the Sending section, Choose Always keep a copy in the drop down menu named Save mail that you send to  have a copy in the Sent Folder always.
4. If you dont want to save a copy, choose Dont keep a copy in the menu. Alternatively you can make Notes prompt whether to save a copy or not everytime a mail is sent by selecting Always prompt.
5. Click OK to save the settings.