Lotus Notes: The Future of Email That Wasn't

> “If I want to ‘refresh’ the inbox shouldn’t I press F5? Nope, that will lock the app and require your password to unlock it,” went one of the many complaints collected on Stack Overflow co-founder Jeff Atwood’s blog. “How do I send an email? CTRL+ENTER? Of course not! ALT+1, naturally.”

I don't know if I want to fault Lotus for that. As someone who juggles between Windows, Mac and Linux on a daily basis, using wrong keyboard shortcuts is something that happens regularly. For most users who only use a single platform, that's even less of a problem -- you only need to learn it once.

This is how I feel about the article in general -- I am not convinced by its arguments. Many of the design decisions make sense to me even today, and are more of a necessary limitation than anything else. I don't see how "at most 8 windows" is any worse than Windows' 256 character limit -- 8 windows are plenty at the time, and you need to decide to stop optimizing for someone who regularly has 20 open windows for no reason and focus on something else. Handling more windows can come later.

This article just reads weird to me.

I'm confused. Where does this article say anything about starting from scratch? Is there a chunk of the story missing? It jumps straight from talking about PLATO Notes to referring to Lotus Notes. There is a "spoiler alert" in there about IBM acquiring Lotus for Notes, but it doesn't spoil anything in this story. Did IBM try to rewrite it from scratch or something? What's happening?

My first internship and job out of college was as a Notes developer. I spent most of my time trying to trick/strongarm Notes into doing what I wanted. Want to build a timekeeping system? Sure, I can do that. A website? No problem, Domino server made it easy(ish).

The paradigm of everything being a database with documents was ahead of its time, but the real power was in LotusScript. It was basically just Javascript and that allowed me to transition to a web dev role later on. I have mostly fond memories of Notes.

As much as it was rough in places (debugging an object oriented LotusScript library, connecting to a web service or dealing with a locked out 64GB NSF), I had to admire the email client was fully built as a Notes database and you could see all the source code for yourself so internally Lotus at least believed in it.

Having said that, once you're locked in (and I don't just mean email I mean the hundreds of custom applications your company has built) it's a slog to get off. Meanwhile you still pay the full licence costs whether you have one custom app or a hundred.

I worked for Ray Ozzie at Groove, and I still mourn what that could have become. It was, in many ways, a modern reimagining of Notes, but that meant it had the same problem: customers and users thought they were using a product, but they had actually bought a PLATFORM. It was a digital choose your own adventure, but people really wanted a better chat room.

Same thing with Google Wave, really.

It's 2026 and I am still in the middle of porting our notes databases to web. Notes is still the main platform for our applications, we have around 50 or so. I have a lot of respect for what notes is and what it enabled developers to do and I try to bring some ideas of it to the platform I am building. Funny enough today is exactly the day I did the initial commit on the new project one year ago. Happy birthday to my platform i guess.

As someone who used Lotus Notes 6 for over 2 years at my previous job as the primary email client a few years back (think 2020s), no, it was not a pleasant experience to use Lotus Notes, especially since we had a O365 subscription for everything else and our major customer at the time was Microsoft. After a year at that job, it costed me so much productivity that I had to essentially jerry-rig desktop Outlook to work with the Domino server on my machine just so I don't have to fight it every step of the way.

The issue with Lotus Notes is that there was too much low-level machinery exposed directly to the client, and things you would expect to work with a basic email client, like .ics invites, simply never works right. There was no good dev environment for it, and most of the "develop your own app" feature was locked by corporate policy anyways so we pretty much had the worst of both worlds.

All in all, not something I would recommend to actually use, the only thing it really helped me see is that OneNote's lineage from Lotus Note as I think a lot of the original Lotus Note devs jumped to Microsoft at the time.