And yes, we know that Notes 7 is out. That doesn't mean Notes 6 coverage is going to end anytime soon. Most of you are still running and maintaining Notes 6. So read on.

We've had reports of many extra blank lines and white space appearing in the HTML newsletters you've gotten. We've been told that pictures and text wind up either in the center or somehow show up on either the extreme left or right. And, tables sometimes get all whacked out, with information that should be centered showing up on the left or cells that are way too wide for their own good.

It turns out this is a bug -- and, according to our friends at IBM, it's been fixed in releases 6.0.5 and 6.5.4, so if you're running a different release, you might want to upgrade.

Our IBM friends also had some other recommendations if you're using an earlier release. Each of these recommendations rely, mostly, on using Internet Explorer or Firefox to view the Web page. For example, you could "View the newsletter at the originating Web site using a Web browser to see the correct formatting."

You can also use the forwarding mechanism in Notes to perform a format conversion, as this tip describes:

Forward the message to your Internet address, instead of your Notes mail address. Forwarding requires the Notes editor to save the message as Notes rich text and covert the message to MIME, which can improve the legibility of any tables in the newsletter. (If your Internet address resolves to your Notes mail address when you try to forward the newsletter, then add your name and Internet e-mail address as an entry in your Personal Address Book to prevent this.)

Finally, we've been told that editing the message can help:

Some customers report that simply making a small edit, then saving or sending the message to their Notes address has resolved the problem for some newsletter formats.

By the way, if you go ahead and upgrade to a later version and don't want these fixes active (most likely because you've built something that relies on the incorrect formatting), you can turn it off. Put the following line in your Notes.ini file:

We generally recommend keeping up with IBM's point releases. Often truly annoying bugs are fixed quite nicely in an incremental update.

David Gewirtz is the author of How To Save Jobs and Where Have All The Emails Gone? For more than 20 years, he has analyzed current, historical, and emerging issues relating to technology, competitiveness, and policy. David is the Editor-in-Chief of the ZATZ magazines, is the Cyberterrorism Advisor for the International Association for Counterterrorism and Security Professionals, and is a member of the instructional faculty at the University of California, Berkeley extension. He can be reached at david@zatz.com and you can follow him at http://www.twitter.com/DavidGewirtz.