After four years of using Lotus Notes Mail, you will never fail to learn something new about it once in a while. This software tool is a ubiquitous dinosaur that can be found being used only in large corporate organizations. While savvy netizens out there area embracing Google Gmail and Mozilla Thunderbird, corporate users are still languishing in the archaic PC era.

I was trying to organize my notes mail archives this morning. Mails from business associates and acquaintances are scattered in several file locations. I selected 400 mail documents and pressed Ctrl-X (cut) so that I can paste it later into the desired notes archive database. While the process was running on notes, I went over to Maybank2u to do some banking. I used the Ctrl-C (copy) command on some figures. When the I got back to notes, and the cut process has completed, I realized I can't do any copying of the email documents any more. To my horror, it's gone. The documents are not in the Clipboard anymore.

With so many documents to copy, storing in the Windows Clipboard is definitely not possible. It has to be a Notes process. Those email documents must have been cached somewhere. It has to be. I launched Windows Explorer, searched for the latest files modified in the local drive. Nothing. But hey, my notes is connected to network and uses a home directory on the server. I searched and found this curious looking file "~clipbrd.ncf" that was recently modified about the time when I was doing the cutting process. Filename is so obvious and ".ncf" stands for "Lotus Notes Internal Clipboard File". Great, first hurdle out of the way.

Filesize is about 70MB. So I copied that file first onto my local to make things faster. Tried opening the file in Lotus Notes but got the following error message:

"Database is not fully initialized yet. (It does not contain any views). You will have to use 'Replicate...' on the 'File, Replication', menu to initialize it."
I fiddled with the Replication functions in Lotus Notes to see if I can get the file to be opened. My data has got to be in there. I knew it.

Then I had an idea. Copy the file and paste a new one into the same location. Rename it with a ".nsf" extension. Open the file in Lotus Notes. Of course you will get the same error message. But this time I opened it with my Lotus Notes Designer. Apply the Lotus Notes Mail R5.0 template onto this files. Once the design template update process completed, I opened it up in Lotus Notes and no more error message. I still can't see my email documents in the Inbox. But when I click on the All Documents view, walla, my email documents are all there - all intact! Yeah! Phew!

Sigh... luckily I am a genius.

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