Mail doesn't work right after removing Alloy from the Domino server

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Mail doesn't work right after removing Alloy from the Domino server
By David Gewirtz

A reader sent in the following question. Normally, we make sure to publish our readers' names, but as you can tell by reading how she wrote the question, this week it seemed more advisable to keep her identity secret:

I noticed you've started answering reader questions and I was hoping you'd help with one of my mysteries.

My boss insisted we install Alloy and then later insisted we uninstall it. While that's a mystery in its own right, the real problem I'm having is with the email templates.

Once you uninstall Alloy, I'm still getting Alloy templates and its screwing things up. And, of course, my pointy-hair is on my case to fix it, even though he's the one who caused the problem.

For those of you who aren't familiar with it, Alloy is an IBM and SAP product that allows you to integrate SAP business processes with Lotus Notes and Domino. Cool stuff.

But what our reader asks (we'll call her Joy) is how to undo the Alloy installation. When she originally installed Alloy, she replaced users' master mail templates design inheritance with one provided by Alloy, usually one that pulls Alloy elements from NDERPmail.ntf.

To fix the problem, she's got to replace the Alloy template with the original version from Notes or Domino. I'd recommend going back to mail8.ntf.

Doing so is pretty straightforward. In the Database Design section of the mail application's properties, find the Inheritence section. Change the template name field to point to mail8.ntf.

Choose Replace Design and you should be good to go.

Oh, and make sure you type or choose the .ntf file. I mistakenly typed .nft and it took me an hour on a Sunday afternoon that I could have devoted to watching MacGyver reruns to figure out what had gone wrong.

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.