Understanding the mail policy settings document

A mail policy settings document allows you to create and apply Notes® client settings for mail calendar and schedule tools.

Mail policy settings can be used to:

  • Create and manage message disclaimers. Use the Mail > Message Disclaimers tab on the Mail policy settings document to enter the text of the message disclaimer.
  • Set mail Inbox maintenance preferences designating whether to enable Inbox Maintenance, which documents to remove, and whether unread documents should be removed from a user's Inbox.
  • Set user mail preferences such as whether a user can delegate ownership of their mail file to other people, define Sent view preferences, specify Recall Message settings and set other mail-related preferences.
  • Set alarm notification preferences and default alarm settings.
  • Set numerous Calendar and To Do preferences for users, including Rooms and Resources settings.
  • Set preferences to detect non-Notes email client users, improving interoperability amongst them and Notes client users in your organization, for example when exchanging repeating meeting invitations.
  • Set iNotes® settings. For information on creating mail policy settings for IBM® iNotes users, see the IBM iNotes administrator product documentation.

A user's mail policy is stored in that user's mail database in the calendar profile. By default, the administration process writes the mail policy to the calendar profile.

The administration process checks for and applies mail policy updates every 12 hours.

Message disclaimers and character sets

Message disclaimers can be added by the server or by the client.

The client adds message disclaimers prior to converting the character set; therefore, the client process for determining Internet character sets for MIME messages has not changed.

  • The Domino® server converts the message from Notes RTF to MIME format and determines the Internet character set for the message. Server disclaiming must be enabled to allow the server to add a disclaimer.
  • If the client is not configured to disclaim messages, the Domino server disclaims the message as described. If necessary, the server converts the RTF message to a MIME format message.

When message disclaimers are added by the server, Domino determines the Internet character sets for the message text and the message disclaimer. If the character sets are the same, Domino adds the message disclaimer and the message is sent. If the two character sets differ, Domino determines which character set to use as follows:

  • If the Multilingual Internet mail setting is Use Best Match, Domino uses either the message text's character set or the disclaimer's character set according to which character set best represents the characters. Any characters that cannot be represented by the correct character are represented by a substitute character -- typically a question mark (?). Domino then sends the message.
  • If the Multilingual Internet mail setting is Use Unicode (UTF-8), Domino re-codes the message text and disclaimer text as UTF-8 and sends the message.