I love exploring the new features the new Lotus Notes 8.5.2 client offers, especially the small and quirky ones that you overlook so easy. One of them, I find particularly nice. The option to save mail messages to uniform mail standard files (*.eml) that include formatting and attachments and saves to the file system or hard drive.

Why do we need this? Well, you’ll be surprised how many people needed this. Customers for instance that work with non-Lotus Digital Filing, Archiving and or Document Management systems. Before they would often have to have either a middleware product or add-on to be able to input Lotus Notes messages directly into their other systems. Or worse; save the message to a word or a txt file before adding it as a file. This meant a lot of extra work and costs so they will definitely welcome this new option.

To use it simply open the message and from the [File]  menu select [Save as…], select the location where to store it and select the .eml extension.
 or…
Open the view or folder that contains the mail message(s), select the message(s) you want to save to .eml and drag them to a folder on your hard diks/file system (e.g. using Windows explorer for instance). Each selected message will be saved as an individual file.

It works great! There is just one thing I find inconsistent….

Thanks to Vincent Schuurman for blogging about the Drag&Drop option

Additional Update:

One more thing to keep in mind is that in the in the [User Preferences] – [Basic Notes Client Configuration] – [Additional Options] there is a setting that needs to be activated for this to work. Otherwise drag&drop will only create links, not .eml files.