The error message “You are not authorized to access this database” is caused by a lack of rights set in Notes’ ACL, Access Control List. When this error message is displayed, the administrator of the ACL will have to change the permissions of the user in question.
Category: E-mail
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Lotus Notes: "You are not authorized to access this database"
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Lotus Notes: "type mismatch on external name"
The company I’m working from is currently migrating from Notes 6 to Notes 8. As I’ve said earlier, I’ve been using the latter for some time, and am mostly happy that I am.
A service call I got the other day had a user reporting that she’d get a “Type mismatch on external name…” when opening her calendar afet she’d upgraded to Notes 8. Not the most informative of errors, but that is the way of Notes, it seems.
One of the interesting things about upgrading from one version of Notes to another is that with a new version of Notes, comes a new design for the mailfile. I encountered it with the upgrade from Notes 5 to Notes 6, though there, the issue was mostly related to layout and design.
The solution, then, to this problem is to upgrade the mailfile design. -
Windows XP SP3 blocks uninstall of software
As previously reported, Windows XP with Service Pack 3 has a nasty tendency to cause people to be unable to uninstall software such as Internet Explorer 7 and Internet Explorer 8.
What I didn’t know, was that it doesn’t confine itself to blocking uninstall of these programs, but that it also blocks the uninstall of, for example, Lotus Notes.
I even got an error message; this one, to be exact: “The Windows Installer Service Could Not Be Accessed”
It would seem that Service Pack 3 actually blocks software from accessing the Windows Installer Service. The solution, then, is to uninstall Service Pack 3. After I did that, I could uninstall Lotus Notes. -
Lotus Notes: Resolve "Type mismatch" error
I recently had a user call inn to report that whenever she tried to delete an invitation to a meeting, she got this error:
The invitation in question would get an X beside it, and delete when she refreshed her screen.
The solution is luckily simpler than the error message could lead us to believe; a simple change to the preferences is all that is needed:
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Read your GMail while offline
In a previous post, I talked about Google Gears. Now, let’s take a look at a practical application. First, the developers at Google brought us the next big thing in web-based email. Now, they are bringing a way to take it offline.
Bear in mind, Offline is a GMail Labs feature, so it is wont to be a bit unstable for now. That being said, here’s how to enable the feature:
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Lotus Notes: Notes automatically deletes email
A while back, a user called in, telling me that he had lost a lot of important email. All of the emails he lost were roughly three months old, and he’d lost all of his emails that were older than three months.
The cause of this problem was that the user had set a flag in his Replication settings, instructing Notes to delete emails older than 90 days. After removing this flag, the user no longer had this problem:
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Lotus Notes: Resolving "You are not authorized to use the server" errors
The error message “You are not authorized to use the server” is caused by the user being entered into the Deny list. When this error message is displayed, the administrator of the Deny list will have to change the permissions of the user in question.
Edit: A commenter commented that I’d got it wrong, so I’ve now corrected it. -
Lotus Notes: Resolving "File truncated – file may have been damaged" errors
The error message “File truncated – file may have been damaged” is most often seen server-side, but every once in a while it will turn up on client computers, especially where Notes is installed on a network share (not a good idea) and synchronised to the local machine through offline folders. -
Lotus Notes: "Invalid or non-existent document"
As I have noted earlier, Lotus Notes is not famous for having easily understandable error-messages, quite the opposite in fact. However, when you think a bit about it; some messages are clearer than others. An example of this is the “Invalid or non-existent document” error.
The problem in this case is that an entry in an NSF-file (a document in a database) is corrupt. This can happen for various reasons. There are two ways to fix the problem, one server-side, and one client-side.
Server-side
On the server console, run the commandload fixup %NAME OF DATABASE%
This will remove the faulting documents from the index and from the database
Client-side
Some databases can be replaced client-side (basically any databases located in the Data catalog of Notes). To replace them, simply rename the file, then start Notes. Notes will then recreate the file from the .ntf. NOTE: This will delete any and all entries in the database. -
Lotus Notes – Resolving "Illegal Circular USE" errors
A client of mine called me up, saying she had a problem with Lotus Notes. She had recently upgraded from Lotus Notes version 5 to Lotus Notes version 6, and now got a lot of error messages every time she opened just about anything, really. The error message she received said: “Illegal circular USE: DocumentConversions”.
As it turns out, the solution is pretty straight forward. The problem is that the design of the users’ mailfile is outdated. All you need to do is update it to the design for Lotus Notes version 6, and off you go. -
Firefox – Open mailto:-links in GMail
I use GMail a lot. I also send a lot of emails, many of those originating from mailto:-links. Hence, it is practical to have mailto:-links open in GMail.
This is quickly and simply achieved by going to Tools, Options, Applications. In the search-field, simply enter mailto, then use the Action-field to select GMail, Yahoo Mail or something else, like so:
Some installations of Firefox do not have the GMail-alternative. This is simply fixed. Open a new tab, then enter about:config in the address-bar. Into the filter enter
gecko.handlerService.AllowRegisterFromDifferentHost, then doubleclick the value so that it is set to true. Then copy/paste the following piece of Javascript to your Addressbar:javascript:window.navigator.registerProtocolHandler("mailto", "https://mail.google.com/mail/?extsrc=mailto&url=%s","Gmail"). When asked whether you want to add GMail as an application, answer “yes”.