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> First and foremost, in the day and age of GUI mail clients one would > expect that when you drag-and-drop a file into a message-compose window > it would attach that file. No, not in Lotus Notes. It EMBEDS the file > if it is a Word or HTML file or some such, making a message nearly > unreadable or un-editable if you're sending a large document. Yeh, you have to use "attach". The problem with Notes is that it's not a mail client. It's a distributed database... kind of like you'd get if you were to give a bunch of old-time mainframe hacks and DBAs the job of building the World Wide Web... with the Notes client the browser. So that message you're editing? That's a document, with 3270-like fixed fields mixed up with editable sections. Think of it as a mail program you're going to get all messed up. Technically it wouldn't be at all difficult for a reasonably skilled Notes hacker to write an IMAP-Notes proxy that treaed your local replica as the IMAP server database and let you run any local IMAP client to view it. The problem is that it doesn't seem to be something any reasonably skilled Notes hacker would think of writing... because by the time they've become skilled enough thir brain has been rewired for the Notes world... it'd be as hard to imagine as someone in the FSF bothering to write an Info file browser that doesn't suck dirty swamp water when they've got GNU Emacs at hand. Now that I think of it, there's a lot of similarities there. It's a complex and powerful application that you can program to do anything, and once you're doing that you don't see any point in using separate dedicated programs that interoperate with each other... you just pile more macros and lisp on what you already have. Which works well enough, except it's frustrating for people on the outside who haven't joined the collective yet. I wonder if you could get GNU Emacs to work with a Notes replica. Or would there be some kind of explosion?
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