Genii Weblog
Sending a message... to IBM
Mon 12 Jan 2009, 05:45 AM
Tweetby Ben Langhinrichs
I am a huge fan of Lotus Notes. I have based my business, my livelihood, my children's college educations, on Lotus Notes. But I believe one can applaud the product while still raising hell about a deficiency in it. I have been accused, perhaps fairly, in coming up with an extreme case of formatting that would not normally be expected to render properly. So, I decided to go back to basics and try again with IBM's formatting. The following is the Notes Client (8.0.1) Help topic "Sending a message" which I got to via Help - Help Contents - Lotus Notes - Mail - Sending a message. It would be hard to argue that this is not something a user would see, or formatting that would not be used, yet after IBM's MIME conversion, it renders like a nicely formatted web page from which someone deleted the CSS file.
Help topic, copied into a mail message (with the colors, fonts and everything matched as closely as I could)
![Help topic in Notes rich text](Help1.png)
That message in MS Outlook 2003 (after IBM's MIME conversion)
![Help topic sent to Outlook with IBM conversion](Help3.png)
That message in Notes 8.0.1 client after being mailed through the Internet (after IBM's MIME conversion)
![Help topic in Notes after IBM's MIME conversion](Help4.png)
That message in MS Outlook 2003 (after Genii's conversion)
![Help topic in Outlook after iFidelity's MIME conversion](Help2.png)
So what is the message to IBM? Well, you can try this one:
Copyright © 2009 Genii Software Ltd.
What has been said:
759.1. Chuck Hauble (01/12/2009 05:00 AM)
Ben, just curious.. are you letting the server do the conversion or are you sending as mime format from the client..
759.2. Chuck Hauble (01/12/2009 06:19 AM)
I whole heartedly agree that the conversion is astonishingly bad.. thanks for the update.. is there a beta of you new tool to try out?
759.3. Chuck Hauble (01/12/2009 06:21 AM)
any better in 8.5?