Attaching Lotus Notes links to Outlook Mail

My company has migrated from Outlook/Exchange to Lotus Notes, then back to Outlook/Exchange. With the latest migration away from Notes, we left some vital Notes databases in place. So now we use Outlook for mail, and Notes for repositories.

...Yeah, it's that kind of place. If you've been around awhile and know where things are, you are indispensable :).

Anyway, the great thing about using Notes for email and work was that you could embed all kinds of referral links in your email using "copy as link" at the Notes data and then ctrl+v paste in the email. The ctrl+v doesn't work in Outlook, which is a drag. So here's a work around...

Step 1 - Copy as Link
Go to your Notes document or database (shown below), right click and select "copy as link"

Step 2 - Paste Ctrl+V to a Text Editor

Note the interesting markup

Step 3 - Save the Text File with an .NDL Extension

Step 4 - Attach the .NDL file to your Email Message

...as shown. When the recipient double-clicks the attachment, they go right to Notes!

"Shredding" your Outlook Documents

Have you ever used the "Tools/Recover Deleted Items..." option in Outlook? A friend tipped me to it earlier this year. If your company uses Outlook for email, get familiar with this option and use it often to clean up after yourself. You don't need to keep personal (or worse yet, incriminating) emails within easy reach of an Outlook administrator.

Deleting Items
You delete email all the time, and are probably familiar with the Outlook "deleted items" folder: (deleted items folder)

To clear space for you mailbox (most administrators enforce a size limit) on the mail server, you probably clear this folder routinely. You do this by deleting all items from the "deleted items" folder, kind of like clearing the recycling bin on your file system.

(emptied deleted items)

Clearing Deleted Items, for Good

To remove the items "for good", go to the Tools/Recover Deleted Items menu option and delete all Outlook documents for a third and final time. The "X" icon takes care of it for you. CYA!