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Domino BES – testing handhelds are functioning

Steven Vaughan — Wed, 21 Dec 2011 15:23:45 +0000

A quick and easy test to ascertain if one or more of your Blackberry Enterprise Server users is setup correctly server side or if their device is configured correctly is possible and here’s how……

From your normal Lotus Notes mail (I’m assuming you are using Notes mail !), send the user, users or group an email with the following subject line:

<$Confirm,RemoveOnDelivery,SuppressSaveInSentItems>

If the Blackberry device is able to receive and send messages, you will get an automatic reply. If you don’t get a message back, you know something is wrong. The original message you send is removed immediately and the reply is also deleted from their sent view.

A couple of Caveats:

The original message you sent and the reply mail will be in the users trash view.
Obviously this will not work if the handset is turned off or doesn’t have the appropriate signal, in this case the original message you send will also not be deleted until their handset is online.

Restrict email to Domino directory Groups – now coming to iNotes !

Steven Vaughan — Wed, 26 Jan 2011 15:40:24 +0000

It’s fairly well documented that you can restrict users from emailing certain groups if you change the readers field on the group to specified users/groups. That works great (in later releases).

You can’t however say the same about iNotes. When a user addresses a memo to a “restricted” group in iNotes, they get the following error:

If the user clicks on “Use Name Anyway” the mail is successfully sent. Not great.

This will apparently be fixed in Domino R8.5.2 FP2 and R8.5.3.

Email Signatures with Graphics

Steven Vaughan — Fri, 17 Sep 2010 09:54:09 +0000

A question that comes up on occasion from our customers relates to having graphics in email signatures. Do they work ? Why do the graphics appear as attachments for some recipients etc ?

Of course some companies love using graphics in email signatures. It promotes the brand, can make the email look very professional but it doesn’t always work. Why ?

Embedded Graphics
Using embedded graphics in signatures can lead to problems with the recipient seeing the signature as sent. The graphics may be stripped out and added as normal attachments or removed altogether. This is due mainly to the recipients email systems. Some companies do not allow embedded graphics or embedded html into their environment for security purposes.

Using graphics hosted on an Internet server
A workaround for the above may be to have graphic “placeholders” in your HTML signatures which then load the graphics from a server located on the Internet. This way the graphics are not embedded within the signature but load when the recipient user opens the email. The caveats for this solution are that some companies do not allow any HTML coming into their systems thus rendering this solution useless or the user receiving the email may not have internet access to retrieve the graphics.

Summary
Using embedded graphics or hosted graphics will work fine for a lot of recipient users/companies but you can never guarantee that either option will work. There are two many variables in place such as the recipients external facing or internal email system which may have policies in place restricting usage. No companies are obliged to allow graphics via email into their environment nor are there standards that suggest that you have to. These policies are strictly personal to the company and so using graphics in an email signature will carry some risk that your branding will be diluted.

Please let me know your experiences on using graphics in emails……