Lotus Notes 8.5 Client For Mac

Note: Notes is no longer under development, and it is no longer available for download Lotus Notes is the premier, integrated desktop client option for accessing e-mail, calendars and applications on IBM Lotus Domino server. Business decision-making cycles are highly collaborative, and e-mail is only a small part of the technology solution. Think outside the in-box.
Lotus Notes 8.5 See all Lotus Notes is the premier, integrated desktop client option for accessing e-mail, calendars and applications on IBM Lotus Domino server.

The title may sounds pretentious but extracting mails out of Lotus Notes issoooo hard and complicated, that achieving such a task feels like winning anepic battle against the forces of evil.

IBM first unveiled the Notes 8.5 Mac beta in January 2007, and released a newer version of the client for that application in May 2008. This move into the Mac universe is the latest in IBM's aggressive marketing of Lotus Notes - and its continuing efforts to its rival Microsoft. Run Lotus Notes 8.5 on Mac, Linux & Chrome OS IBM Lotus® Notes®, the premier integrated client option for IBM Lotus Domino® server, delivers e-mail, calendar and scheduling capabilities, integrated instant messaging, personal information management (PIM) tools, discussion forums, teamrooms, and reference databases with basic workflow along.

Anyway. The goal of this post is to help you migrate all your Lotus Notes mailsto a more convenient and standard format like maildir or mailbox.

There are several ways of extracting all your mail trapped in Lotus Notes’proprietary databases.

Method #1: Using Integrated IMAP Service ¶

This is probably the simplest method. It consists in using the Lotus Notesdesktop client (were your emails currently resides) as an IMAP client.

Essentially, what you have to do is just to create a secondary account linkedto an IMAP server, like Gmail, etc. This works well and is explained indetails in this tutorial .

But sometimes your Notes client is behind firewalls and proxys. So you can’treach the Internet.

And some other times, Lotus Notes clients are crippled and don’t let you createan IMAP connexion. Unfortunately this happened to me:

So I had to found another approach.

Method #2: Using `nlconverter` ¶

This method is explored in details in my previous article .

But again, it seems that the Lotus Notes on my machine was crippled and/orcorrupted. The nlconverter GUI gave me this error:

And the command line gave me this:

After these two failed attempts, I was quite depressed and not far fromsurrender to the evil power of proprietary software. Then I managed to setup anew (but complicated) strategy.

Method #3: Using Lotus Notes Client for Mac OS X ¶

This is the only method that worked for me, and basically, is the same as thefirst one, but on Mac OS X. Additionally, it involves a local mail server. Thisprocedure was tested several times on Mac OS X Leopard .

First things first, download the trial version of Lotus Notes client for Mac OS X (unfortunately you have to register) and install it. I used Lotus Notes 7.0.3 for Mac OS X Leopard:

You’ll be welcomed by a wizard :

On the next screen, enter a dummy name and uncheck the “ I want to connect to a Domino server ” box:

Then proceed to the next step in which you’ll uncheck “ Setup instant messaging ”:

In the last screen, uncheck all boxes. We don’t want to setup any other service yet:

Initial setup is now complete:

You can now launch Lotus Notes:

On first run, there will be the following screen, where you should click on the “ No thanks, just give me the defaults ”:

You’ll end up on what will be your default Lotus Notes main page from now on:

The next step is to go back to the machine (Windows for me) from which you’re running the Notes client containing all the mails you plan to migrate. From there, export your mail database :

All details of this operation can be found in this dedicated article .

Then go back to your Mac OS X machine and import your freshly exported .nsf database. This is as simple as opening the file via the File > Database > Open... menu and dialog:

When Notes attempts to open the file, you’ll be prompted by several dialogs regarding the security attached to the database. If you get the “ Create Cross Certificate ” screen, then just answer “ Yes ” as below:

And every time you get an “ Execution Security Alert ” message, always checkthe “ Start trusting the signer to execute this action ” option before clicking“ OK ”:

The client will then rebuild the index before giving you a plain view of your inbox:

Next step is to setup a local IMAP server:

As you can see I used Dovecot, and all is explained here .

Now it’s time to create a new account in Lotus Notes to access this local IMAP server. Click on the Address Book in your toolbar and add a new Account :

Here is where you configure Notes to let it be aware of our local server existence. Only the first tab must be changed to your local parameters. You can left the last two tabs untouched:

Open within Notes your local IMAP mailbox. It is found in the workspace, which you can access via the Databases icon on your toolbar:

You’ll be welcomed by a useless help screen:

Just close it to get your local IMAP mail view:

While trying to opening the local IMAP mailbox, you may encounter this TCPIP port error:

In this case, please have a look at my other article explaining how to open TCPIP port in Lotus Notes .

For this step, just copy or cut, then paste, mails from your local .nsf database to your local IMAP account:

While playing with copy’n’paste, you may encounter this error:

A workaround can be found in this article .

Finally, if like me you’ve played a lot with mails during the transfer step above, you may ends up with loads of duplicate mails. In this case have a look at the deduplication script I wrote. It will help you clean-up your Maildir folder.
That’s it! You now have a standard Maildir of your Lotus Notes mails, located in your user home directory ( ~/Maildir ):

My ultimate action was to convert the Dovecot maildir to Kmail maildir ,as I wanted to use Kmail to finally upload everything in Gmail. But you can useanything that suit your needs, like thunderbird or any mail conversion tools.

Lotus Notes Mail Client

Method #4: Lotus Notes Client V8.5 on Mac OS X Leopard ¶

The same procedure as in method #3 can be performed with the trial version ofthe Lotus Notes client v8.5, running on Mac OS X Snow Leopard .

Here are the equivalent screenshots:

Lotus Notes Client 8.5 3 For Mac Download

Method #5: Lotus Notes Client on Windows XP ¶

I just tried the first method again ( IMAP connection with Note’s fat client).But this time I installed Lotus Notes 8.5.2 trial version on a fresh Windows XP running within a QEMU instance.