By Vladimir Tankhimovich
When a colleague asked me a few days ago if it was possible to see in IMAP client messages sent from Notes, iNotes, or Lotus Traveler, I said "hell, no". IMAP can only see folders, and "Sent" is a view. Never going to happen.
Then I decided to look around, just in case, and found this amazing technote: IMAP view and folder synching/
In short, it says that in the 8.5.2 mail template, they added hidden Sent, Drafts and Trash folders, visible via IMAP, and you can synchronize them with Notes views Sent, Drafts and Trash. All you need to do is add a notes.ini variable to your IMAP server:
No server or task restart required. IMAP clients should subscribe to the new folders and set Sent and Drafts as special folders to save sent mail and drafts.
Caveats
There are a couple of caveats I have encountered so far. Immediately after enabling the feature, I started getting errors on the console and in statrep.nsf:
(Sent)|IMAPSent (NT000575AE) in database D:\Lotus\Domino\data\mail\filename.nsf.
Database should be re-enabled for IMAP support.
I compiled a list of mail files from the errors into a text file and re-enabled them for IMAP:
load convert -e -f D:\imap.txt
After that errors went away.
A few users had their own Sent and Drafts folders created by Thunderbird IMAP. They received errors "append folder not found in IMAP mail space". For those users I had to open their mail files while holding Ctrl-Shift to show hidden folders and manually drag documents from the old to the new Sent and Drafts, then delete old folders.
My colleague is very happy. He can now see in Thunderbird emails he sent from his Android phone/Traveler and vice versa.
Vladimir Tankhimovich is Postmaster at Columbia Law School. Born in Siberia, he came to US in 1995 and has been a Notes/Domino administrator since 1997. Learn more about him at http://www.linkedin.com/in/tankhimovich.