With changing school districts, I need to export my 1.5+ GB of e-mail out of Lotus Notes and into something useful to me. Since I have been working on consolidating my many e-mail accounts into just a few Gmail-enabled accounts, Gmail seemed like the natural choice for the export. After all, both Gmail and Lotus Notes support IMAP with SSL. It can’t be that hard, can it?
It was. After about an hour of trying to configure IMAP connections to Gmail using two versions of Lotus Notes, I was finally able to get a connection to work with Lotus Notes 8. Here is what you have to do to get it to work.
Choose Preferences… from the File menu. In the Preferences dialog window, chose Accounts from the list on the left. You will see all of the accounts that are accessible with your Lotus Notes configuration. Click on the New Account button to setup your Gmail account:
Here is the important information (which you can also see by clicking on the image above):
| Field | Value |
|---|---|
| Account Name | The account name you will see in Lotus Notes |
| Type | IMAP Online (SSL Enabled) |
| Server | imap.gmail.com |
| Password | Your Gmail password |
| Port number | 993 |
| Sent folder name | [Gmail]/Sent |
| Drafts folder name | [Gmail]/Drafts |
| Accept SSL site certificates | Yes |
| Accept expired SSL certificates | Yes |
| Send SSL certificates when asked (outbound connections only) | Yes |
To open your Gmail account, you can click on the Open button under the menu bar and search for the account name you entered when creating the account. You can also open your Workspace (Open > Application > Workspace) and find an icon for your account there.
Now you can cut and paste messages between your Lotus Notes e-mail or archive and your Gmail account. I have noticed that calendar entries may pose a problem (I am using the All Documents view to get messages), so just skip over them. You may also run into messages for which Lotus Notes cannot find the UID. I am deciding to forget those messages, unless someone has a solution for this.
I hope that helps those of you transitioning from Lotus Notes to Gmail. If you have any other tips related to this, please post them in the comments.
So now you have 1.5GB+ of email that is available for data mining as well as no guarantee of being there tomorrow. With anything in life you get what you pay for. Notes can create a local database to hold all that important email safely, without risking losing it.
Gmail is one of the best free mail services out there. It doesn’t mean they won’t change the rules or delete your mail for the hell of it.
Another way you could have done it is to IMAP or POP enabled your Domino Server and automatically fetch the data using your Google Account.
- Thomas
hi
Plz provide me step by step info to configure gmail with lotus notes 7.0.2
hi……….. how to configure lotus notes 8
Thanks for these instructions. It worked in Lotush*t 7 too, although the screens looked a bit different.
Have you discovered any way to automate the cut and paste process in Lotus (like the way one can schedule archiving of messages)?
I also got the UID error message. When you say you just ignore it, what do you mean? Because it seems like the messages cannot be pasted when the message occurs. Is that your experience too?
@JR: By “forget those messages,” I meant that I was not transferring them to Gmail and just letting them get deleted with my Lotus Notes account. I could not find a way to get those messages moved to Gmail, and many of them were included in other replies in the message threads.