Lotus Notes, while being a robust and flexible messaging platform, has always suffered from its little idiosyncrasies on the client. The Notes client has received a dramatic face-lift with version 8, but there is still room for improvement.

One such peculiarity is the default “reply-with-attachment”. I never understood why anybody would want to return the original attachment to the sender. Because Notes displays the attachments in the message body, many users don’t realize that the original file is included in the reply. I have seen message threads that contained the same 2MB PowerPoint in a lengthy back-and-forth discussion between numerous people, resulting in more than 100MB of storage and network consumption.

At a time of rampant email growth and ever-increasing archiving requirements, this little oversight can significantly add to operational costs. While this default behavior could easily be changed through a modification to the mail template, I am not sure that many companies have actually done that.

It seems that the Notes engineering team is listening to their customers and are considering changing the default behavior in the next release. If you care about this, you may want to add your voice to the current discussion thread on Mary Beth Raven’s blog.

Technorati Tags: nd8, lotus notes

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