Article - Accurate conversion of Lotus Notes E-Mail Addresses to a SMTP address

Some conversion applications may create problems for your e-mail by applying a ‘best guess’ formula to convert Lotus Notes (or Lotus Notes Exchange) email addresses (like Kim Beros/KBCPL) to a SMTP address like (kim.beros@lotus-notes-export.com). It may, at first glance, look like a great feature but can create problems.

Even when you test and analyse the data and start using it, problems might not be apparent but sooner or later you will find that some e-mail is not getting delivered or people are responding to e-mail messages that have invalid SMTP addresses.

When you attempt to apply a formula to get an SMTP address from a Lotus Notes email address you will inevitably run into problems. For example, Last Names and First Names can vary and there can be multiple people with the same first name and last name and some names have three or more parts. Determining which part is the first name is and which is the last name is not always easy.

Applying settings form the Public Address Book may work but these addresses may not correspond to the new post-migration environment. The safest solution is to this issue is to use a translation table. For that you will need software that can handle conversion of each Lotus Notes email address to a particular SMTP email address or software that handles a formula translation and also handle a lookup for more complicated addresses.

Some software will not create a reply-able or forward-able email addresses. This can be checked by double-clicking the addresses in Outlook – if they do not open the Email Properties dialog box, they do not support the function.

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