Lotus Notes eMail client customization

Question

Unfortunately, I have been shanghaied into using the notes client for email. I've done the usual googling to figure out a few things, but haven't come up with solutions, so am turning to this forum for a potential solution:

• How do I set it so that all email is automatically treated as plain ol' text, and not the formatted junk that it insists on doing? Failing this, how do I force it to use the fonts that I specify? I've tried setting it through preferences, but it keeps reverting to its default
• Can is set it up to use an external editor (vim) rather than what it has? I've found a few webpages from 6+ years back, but these solutions go through multiple jumps. I'd like something seamless
• How do I tell it not to change my signature? I format it in plain text, like the way it looks, but notes insists on putting it in its own fonts, screwing up the justification and then puts in line breaks in wierd places. I've tried both telling it to use a text file as well as putting in the signature in the preferences dialog, with no luck

these may seem like minor things, but they're bugging the heck out of me. I'm sure the lotus notes developers are great guys and all, but man, this thing sucks!

while I'm ranting: I tried to convince our admins to allow us to use any other email client, but switching the domino server to smtp will invalidate the support contract that we have! AAAARGGHHHHHHH

thanks for all pointers

Answer 1

These are questions for ServerFault.com not StackOverflow.com. But since there probably aren't enough people to come by this corner of the site and vote to close this and move the question, allow me to go ahead an answer some of it :)

1. I don't know if you can tell Notes to use only plain text for Notes-to-Notes emails. However, you can set in a preference in your Configuration Settings document under MIME > Conversion Options > Outbound to convert from Notes RTF to plain text when sending outside your domain.
   Notes has a concept of "default" fonts, such as Default Sans Serif, Default Monospace, etc. That gives you some control over how your emails look, so if you'd like to change how your emails look (on your client), go to File > Preferences > User Preferences and click the Default Fonts button.
2. Sorry - never heard of doing that and I can only imagine the problems it would cause.
3. Again, you're probably running into a default font issue here. If you're entering the signature as "plain text", you're probably viewing the signature in the Default Sans Serif font, which is likely Arial. If you really want to see a monospaced font, set one as your Default Sans Serif font. Of course, that only changes how YOU see it. Assuming you do the conversion tip above, then it will show up as plain text when you send out of your domain.

To be sure a particular font is used, use HTML for your signature and specify a monospaced font.