Ramblings, ideas, problems, and solutions

Category: E-mail

  • Resolving "An Error Was Encountered While Opening A Window" errors

    Lotus Notes has a plethora of more or less (usually the latter) legible and understandable error messages. One of them I encountered the other day. The situation is as follows: a client of mine told me Notes had crashed, and she was now unable to restart Notes due to a rather cryptic error message: “An Error Was Encountered While Opening A Window”.
     
    Now if we only knew why. The problem, it turns out, is that a process called NTASKLDR is still running. Knowing this, we also know how to resolve the problem. The solution is to kill the process called NTASKLDR. Open the task manager (CTRL+SHIFT+ESC, open the processes tab, find the process and end it.

  • Sametime: Resolving "There was an error opening a chat session…" errors

    I recently encountered the following error message when trying to initiate a chat session with a colleague.
     
    There was an error opening a chat session with User User/Organization/Server. Please try again later or contact your system administrator.Reason : 0x80000005
     
    Apparently, the error “0x80000005” means “The element is non-existent”. What happens is that when I tried to initialize a chat with my colleague, the Sametime client tries to open a Sametime channel to this user. It seems this is so rare an occurrence, the client hasn’t been programmed with a proper error message.
     
    Luckily, the problem is resolved fairly easily. Logging off and on Sametime has resolved the problem for me.

  • Lotus Notes 8 – ‘A Runtime Error has occurred. Do you wish to Debug?’

    I’ve had a few cases of users running into this error message in Lotus Notes 8.0.1:
     
    A Runtime Error has occurred. Do you wish to Debug?
     
    The problem is tied to the embedded version of IBM’s instant messaging system Sametime, and has been reliably reproduced in any of the following conditions:
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  • Reducing spam – the advantage to having a top level domain

    I post comments in many blogs, and for a while, I had a serious problem that whenever I posted my comment with my emailadress, I’d soon see a marked increase in spammail. This all really cleared up when I actually got my own top level domain, razumny.no, and here’s how:
     
    Once the domain was up and running, I started setting up my email accounts. What I did was create one adress, and then set that up as a catch-all adress, so that anything ending it (at) razumny . no would go to my main adress. Once that was done, I started setting up adresses wherever I’d leave a comment, so that when I commented at RennyBA’s Terella, the adress would reflect that.
     
    The point to all of this is elegant in its simplicity; whenever I get an email sent to one of the catch-all adresses, I see which one it is. The practical upshot of this is that if I see an increase in spam to a specific adress, I’ll just block that one adress. This way, I don’t have to set up loads and loads of adresses, and I still keep spam at an absolute minimum.
     
    Another advantage to this setup is, of course, that whenever I spell my email address out to someone, it doesn’t really matter what they put in front of the @-sign, it’ll get to me.

  • Syncronising Lotus Notes Calendar with Google Calendar

    At work, I use IBM’s Lotus Notes as my primary email and calendar client. It works well enough, but there are some issues. My main problem with it though, is that syncronising calendar data with Google Calendar is nigh on impossible, at least out of the box.
     
    Finding this annoying, I talked to a colleague of mine, and asked him if he had any clues as to third party software that could solve my problem. The answer he came up with turned out to be the very thing I’d been looking for. The app is made by a company called CompanionLink Software, and is called Companionlink for Google.
     
    The program is available as a 14 day free evaluation, after that it costs $29,95. Frankly, just under 30 bucks for this piece of software is pretty cheap. It is easy to use, and it just works.
     
    CompanionLink supports the following PIMs:
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  • Resolving problems with GMail Notifier when you’ve set GMail default to HTTPS

    If you’ve fixed the security problem described in my last post, you might have noticed that the GMail Notifier no longer works. It seems Google have also seen this problem occur, and they’ve even made a patch for it. Here’s how to get it, and how to apply it. Happy patching! (more…)

  • Stoppering GMail’s default security problem

    At this year’s DefCon, a security problem inherent to the default settings in GMail was unveiled. The problem is that, by default, GMail does not use encrypted sessions.

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  • Learning to love Notes’ .NTF files

    Lotus Notes is very wary of its database files, also known as .NSF-files, becoming corrupted. So much so, in fact that IBM has created a whole class of files designed to recreate these files. This class of files is called .NTF files.

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  • Doing too much with a single piece of software

    I have written about Lotus notes before. I have written about solutions to problems, and to what I like and/or dislike about it.

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  • Lotus Notes: Resolving “Toolbar configuration not found” errors

    A user called in with an error message I see from time to time in Lotus Notes. The error message in question is the not very informative “Toolbar configuration not found”. Though not overly informative, this error message is simple enough to resolve.

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