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Civility in critiquing the ideas of others is no vice. Rudeness in defending your own ideas is no virtue.


Gotcha? Not so much
Mon 12 Jan 2009, 08:12 AM
A couple of people have asked about our new iFidelity for Lotus Notes rendering, and whether we were not, perhaps, just using the server's MIME conversion, which is known to not be as good as the client's MIME conversion (and, yes, for those who don't know, IBM has two inconsistent MIME conversion engines).  Different is not always the same as better, and in this case it is just astonishing how two different renderings can be equally poor:


Formatted message in Notes (I'll just use the one I have been using)

Notes rich text version of the email


That message sent to Outlook after the Notes 8.0.1 client does the MIME conversion:

Outlook version after Notes client does the MIME conversion


That message sent to Outlook after the Domino 8.0.1 server does the MIME conversion:

Outlook version after Domino server does the MIME conversion


And just to leave a better taste in your mouth, that message sent to Outlook after the iFidelity MIME conversion:

Outlook version after iFidelity does the MIME conversion

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Sending a message... to IBM
Mon 12 Jan 2009, 05:45 AM
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


That message in MS Outlook 2003 (after IBM's MIME conversion)

Help topic sent to Outlook with IBM conversion



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


That message in MS Outlook 2003 (after Genii's conversion)

Help topic in Outlook after iFidelity's MIME conversion



So what is the message to IBM?  Well, you can try this one:


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