When the Recent Contacts feature was introduced in the lotus Notes client it was touted as a great new feature however as companies started using it its flaws became apparent. If you sent an email with an invalid email address in it to a bunch of people then that invalid address would end up in the Recent Contacts list for all those people as well as your own. Then somebody, probably important within the company, would send out an email with an address selected from the recent contacts list and the email would bounce because it was invalid. In some companies Recent Contacts ended up being disabled totally for all users via a policy setting.

Now that 8.5.2 is out there are now three different ways of disabling Recent Contacts. You can turn it off completely, turn of the processing of email addresses found in the CC and BCC fields of emails sent and received or you can turn of the processing of all emails you receive. Unfortunately the desktop policy document was not updated in 8.5.2 to show these new methods of disabling Recent Contacts but all is not lost, using the ‘Custom Settings’ section of the Desktop Policy document you can set one of the following notes.ini variables to achieve the same outcome.

disableDPABProcessing=1
This will turn off Recent Contacts completely and is the same as using the supplied policy setting to disable Recent Contacts.

disableDPABCCprocessing=1
This will turn off the CC and BCC processing of emails that you send or receive. Using this method can still allow invalid entries into your Recent Contacts list if the invalid email address is in the TO line.

DisableDPABReceivedprocessing=1
This will turn of the processing of any email that you receive. Invalid emails may still end up in your Recent Contacts list if YOU enter in the invalid email address

Only one of the three notes.ini variables can exist in your notes.ini file at any one time so if you are going to set them up via policy then I would advise that you make sure that you add all three settings into the policy document and set the value of the one you want to implement to 1 and the values of the other variables would be set to no value so that you don’t end up with any clashes.

Maybe for 8.5.3 somebody will take the time to go through ALL the configuration options in the Notes client and make sure that everything is easily set via a policy document.