One thing I have come across in all
the different organizations I have either worked for or I have done consultancy
gigs at is the need for generic mailboxes that can be accessed by multiple
people. Common examples of this would be a mailbox for Sales or HR.
When creating these mailbox you have
the option of registering a new user in the NAB which will create a new
ID file and a new mail file. Then you can open that mail file up to the
people who need access with a few ACL adjustments and then the staff will
be able to see the emails that the mail file has received and they can
send emails from that mail file, however all emails sent will always have
the ‘Sent By’ moniker attached to them.
Another option is a fantastic Open Source
template available from OpenNTF called ‘Domino
TeamMailBox‘ by Brian Green. This
template has been around for a good few years and was distributed on Brian’s
website long before it was put
on OpenNTF.
With TeamMailBox you create a new database
based on this template on your server and then create a Mail-In Database
record in your NAB to point to the database. You can give this mail-in
record any email address you like ( as long as it doesn’t clash with an
existing email address of course ) and then you adjust the ACL to grant
the required people access to the mail file. Then it’s a simple job
of setting the configuration document in the new TeamMailBox with the name
of the mailbox and the email address and now when people send out emails
it will show that it is from that email address and it will not add the
‘Sent By’ bit to the email.
There are also two scheduled agent in
the TeamMailBox, one to send auto replies to received emails. This could
be handy for the likes of a HR database that sends back a message to say
your query has been received and the second agent is a notification agent
that can send an email to all the members of that HR team to let them know
a new message is waiting to be looked at. I particularly like the
notification agent as I know that sometimes staff do not bother to look
in the shared mailbox ever day and this will stop an email from sitting
in there unnoticed for any period of time.
We have recently started using this
template here at work and I have made a few code adjustments that allows
you to have multiple email addresses associated with a single TeamMailBox
with the option to send emails from any of the associated addresses. Hopefully
this extra functionality will end up on OpenNTF soon…
Dec's Dom Blog 
Using a normal (or ONTF version) Mailbox also works, you just need to set the owner to the Mail-In Record (either by hacking the Template to work around the default validation or just use a tool, but the last will prevent changes to teh signature…).
Unfortunatelly the Team Mailbox lacks all the goodies of the normal ONTF Mailbox . You also can’t use it from offline clients, as you mail won’t get replicated from the local mail.box to the server
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But a normal mailbox adds the ‘Sent By’ bit which is what teamMailBo gets around, also the TeamMailBox does work offline, there is specific code in the sending routines to make sure stuff in the local mail.box will ge to the server.
Tea Mailbox also has signature support with a nice substitution rule that can insert the seners actual name into the signature.
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I can’t say enough good things about this template – it rocks! The widest deployed template after Mail.ntf here.
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Ok, seems that I have to pick the sending code for my other project, which also adds stuff directly to the mail.box
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When you forward a message with the normal mail box the copy of the sent message is saved in your own Sent folder not in the normal box. Do you know if TeamMailBox saves the forwarded messages in the TeamMailBox’s Sent folder?
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