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Gmail IMAP and Lotus Notes 8

by Mark on Jun.13, 2008, under general

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:

New Account window

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.

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22 Comments for this entry

  • foof

    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.

  • Thomas Adrian

    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

  • Jitendra Yadav

    hi

    Plz provide me step by step info to configure gmail with lotus notes 7.0.2

  • nagesh

    hi……….. how to configure lotus notes 8

  • JR

    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)?

  • JR

    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?

  • Mark

    @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.

  • Popo

    Same thing here, some messages create trouble. IMAP support in Notes is really bad, another way to do it would be to enable pop3 in your local Notes client by running npop3.exe and use your local PC public IP in gmail’s fetcher.

  • Adam

    Hello sir,

    Thanks for the info. Now I can receive emails but I cannot send out emails. Any more info is needed for setting up outgoing emails?

  • Mark

    @Adam: You will probably need to setup an SMTP account to use for sending e-mail via Gmail. Google provides documentation for setting up SMTP in various mail clients, but Lotus Notes is not on the supported list. I believe Lotus Notes supports SMTP accounts. So, just use the settings given at the link above to create the SMTP account in Lotus Notes.

  • Phil

    Is it possible to show me step by step instructions on how to configure GMAIL for Lotus Notes 8? – meaning setting up my Lotus to access my gmail.

    Thanks!

  • Chris

    Works great for Lotus Notes 8.5 too!

  • David

    It worked on Lotus 7, but I noticed that the dates are wrong. It will show the actual date and time on which the paste was made…

    Basically, if I copy an email from my Notes archive, received on January 20, and then paste it on the gmail account configured in IMAP… it will show that email in my inbox with the current date and time :-/

    That’s quite shitty because it screws all the dates in my emails, even though the right date appear in the gmail account in Notes. Any explanation ?

  • David

    This is actually a known issue in Gmail :
    http://mail.google.com/support/bin/answer.py?answer=82365&topic=12922

    Did you have this problem using Notes 8 ? If updgrading to the newest version can solve the problem, I’ll do it immediately ! Thanks for the answer…

  • Taina Urquiza

    Hi there, I found your blog via Google and your post looks very interesting for me.

  • prashant

    Thanks sir, its very useful :)

  • dido

    Thanks a ton, man – I’ve be trying to setup my Lotus Notes to read the Gmail account (unsuccessfully) numerous times… Very straight-forward and it worked like a charm from the first try.

  • venths

    I get Configuration settings either missing or invalid… :(

    pls help… I use Lotus 8.0.2

  • Ollie

    I got the same error like venths:
    Configuration settings either missing or invalid

    Please help me, I use Lotus Notes 8.0.2 EN version.

    Thanks!

  • Scripe

    Nice Post Mark very useful. I have actually done it the other way round and am currently pulling my Gmail into notes 8.5.1 I was using POP but went to IMAP as I’ll soon have my gmail on my phone too. and IMAP is better cross platform.
    Anyway, even notes 8.5.1 uses an IMAP template based on it’s notes 5 design. did you manage to get anything looking like notes 8?
    Cheers

  • Mark

    I wish I could help you guys more, but since changing jobs back in July 2008, I have not used Lotus Notes at all. Unfortunately, I have been saddled with using GroupWise, which is even worse than Lotus Notes!

    If anyone out there has any input for those who have posted additional questions here, it would be much appreciated. Since I do not share e-mail addresses of those who comment, please post your responses to questions as a new comment.

    Thanks for reading!

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