Well, I installed Notes 8 M4 on my home PC and I said goodbye to Thunderbird. I did this for a few reasons – one so I can test M4 tools and bugs but more importantly to get back to using Notes for my home email. With the new interface and Eclipse support I can really start to play around.

One problem I had was trying to figure out for the longest time tonight was why I could not connect to smtp.balfes.net over SSL. What a pain in the ass. I finally got the right mix of settings but I needed to add some debug flags to the notes.ini (specifically SmtpClientDebug=3) to see what was really failing.

I finally got a fully working client with these settings:

I also have to mention, I LOVE the side by side preview. I am extremely impressed with the performance – it is just as nice as any other mail client on my machine. Of course I have somewhat of a beefy machine:

Pentium 4 Dual Core 3.2 Ghz, with 2GB RAM.

Tags: Lotus Expeditor : eclipse : Lotus : notes8beta