One of my favorite features of Notes/Domino is how easy it is to set your servers to accept email messages from variations on your actual email address. For example, if Joe Smith’s email address is jsmith@company.com, Notes/Domino can actually be set (using the “More variations” option in the server document - I believe that’s what does it anyway) to accept and route messages sent to joesmith@company.com, joes@company.com, joe.smith@company.com, etc.

That’s one of the most handy things ever! It makes it very easy to get an email to someone at a company when you’re not exactly sure of their email address. Its also helpful for us, because we have employees that work at the corporate office and/or one of our divisions, so we exploit this option to also accept emails from addresses like jsmith@company-subsidiary.com or jsmith@parentcompany.com.

The result is that its very easy to associate email addresses based on whatever naming convention or URL makes the most sense, and IT doesn’t have to manage it on a case-by-case basis. We can just let employees pick whatever makes sense and run with it (the exception to that is our Spam filtering service does require a match, but we auto-load those with common email address alternatives when creating the account for the first time, thus side-stepping the problem in 90% of the cases).

I was reminded of how powerful this is the other day when I was trying to contact someone I recently met but lost a business card for. I guessed and guessed and guessed at their email address before I finally found a winner. The whole time I kept thinking: well THESE people aren’t using Notes… but should!

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