I Need to Send an Automatic Email with Lotus Notes

If you don't know, Lotus Notes is an email client used in a lot of companies around the world. Therefore, I use it at work everyday, but someday I needed to send an automatic email to a few people all Fridays at 10:00.

 

To get this task accomplished I decided to create an agent and avoid remembering the fact of sending the email. As you can image, I did this example on a Spanish version of Lotus Notes 8.5 but I will explain it clearly enough.

The first step is getting yourself into the inbox, then select the "Create" menu item and inside of it, click on "Agent...".

You will get a dialog box opened, in this we have the possibility of setting the rules for this agent. However, in this case we will only set "Trigger" option to "On schedule" with the "Weekly" frequency.

Don't forget to push the "Schedule..." button to program the agent in the right way. After this, select "OK" and close the dialog box.

 

What is next is obviously the saving action, which is inside "File" menu item.

Remember that you just have configured the time of the agent, what is missing is the set of actions this agent will perform, so address to the "Run:" section, where you can read a read-only list showing "Client" and a second one with few alternatives. "Simple Actions" will be selected this time.

As we want to send an email, then we have to push the button "Add action..." which is located below and will display a dialog box where we are going to select the "Send Mail Message" option from the "Action" list.

Once we have selected the action, it's time to complete the required fields and push the "Replace" button.

Now, we have the action configured, but it doesn't work as easy as it seems, the key is to also define a number of documents which will work as filters to trigger the action, it's a little tricky, then, you have to use the left panel (Objects) to click on "Document Selection".

Once you are in the document panel, below you can see the "Add condition..." button, push it, and in the dialog box which is shown select  "In folder".

 

If you select "In folder" condition you will have the opportunity to select the folder which will be considered by the agent to be processed.

Finally, you have to save the agent and let it work by itself.

But... why did I choose a folder as a condition? Because this was the only manner I could make the agent work how I liked it, therefore I created a folder with only one message inside it (any email) and it's now the condition, thus, when the agent begins its task it goes to the folder, find one message inside and only send one email (defined in the agent).

When I didn't use this trick the agent sent a lot of messages, I mean, the same message configured in the agent but sent more than once.