Troubleshooting IBM (Lotus) Notes Issues

This article outlines possible causes of the error message "The server is not responding. The server may be down, or you may be experiencing..." as well as other common issues that can be experienced by Notes users and provides steps for resolving them.

IBM (Lotus) Notes and Domino Designer are legacy tools that were used by faculty and staff for e-mail, web publishing, and collaboration. At this time, IBM Notes is only being used to access and maintain a handful of legacy applications. This article outlines most common issues that may be affecting remaining Notes users.

• Error "The server is not responding"
• Notes is crashing immediately after launching
• Error "File does not exist: mail.box"

 

Server Not Responding

After successfully launching IBM (Lotus) Notes and signing in, you received the following error message:

There are three different reasons why you may be seeing this error message:

1. You will not be able to use IBM Notes software on your workstation if it is not managed by Intune device management (i.e. joined to Azure AD if Windows, or enrolled in Intune if Mac). See this article that explains if your workstation is managed or not: Device Management Basics for Users.
    
2. You must be connected to the securelogin.uwindsor.ca VPN using GobalProtect software that is pre-installed on every managed workstation.
    
3. This could also be caused by an incorrect home server setting in your Lotus Notes location document. Please check your location settings and ensure your home server is listed as "CRONUS/University of Windsor", and not "TRITON/University of Windsor". To edit your locations, select Locations > Manage Locations from the File menu. Click on the name of the location document that you want to edit, and then click on Edit button. For more information, please see: What are the correct settings on a Location document in Lotus Notes?

Once you satisfied all three above conditions, you can test Notes connectivity to the server using the following PowerShell command:

Test-netConnection -Port 1352 -ComputerName cronus.uwindsor.ca

If your connection is still failing, another possibility is that the Lotus Notes server is currently down. Please check with the Service Desk at x.4440

Notes Crashing

As soon as you launch Notes, it crashes and the following message is displayed: "An error has occurred in an IBM Notes application (...)"

This happens usually when you have Adobe Acrobat Professional installed on your PC, which adds a toolbar to the Lotus Notes client to convert e-mail messages and folders into PDF files. Every time an update from Adobe is installed, it causes Notes to crash. The Adobe toolbar integration needs ot be disabled by editing notes.ini file following instructions in this KB article:

• Known issue: Lotus Notes crashes after I installed an Adobe Acrobat Professional update

File does not exist: mail.box

When user tries to submit completed form, the error messages is raised: "File does not exist: mail.box"

This happens if the local mail queue was not created automatically after the location document setting "Mail file location" was changed to  "Local" which is a new default value for this setting. To address this issue, follow these steps:

1. Launch IBM Notes and sign in.
2. Press Ctrl+N on the keyboard to bring up the New Application dialogue box.
3. Type Outgoing Mail in the Title field
4. Type mail.box in the File name field
5. Make sure that the Show advanced templates box is checked
6. Scroll down the list of templates and select Mail Router Mailbox (x)
7. Click OK