{"slug": "lotus-notes", "name": "Lotus Notes", "category": "communication", "category_name": "Email and chat", "description": "", "recommenders": 4, "commenters": 15, "warners": 5, "score": 0.813, "rising": 4.0, "first": "2026-03-09", "latest": "2026-10-18", "why": "I used Lotus Notes in the 00s and 10s and greatly preferred it to Outlook.", "why_is_quote": true, "has_verdict": false, "sentiment": {"recommend": 4, "neutral": 6, "compare": 0, "warn": 5}, "spark": [0, 0, 0, 0, 0, 0, 0, 0, 0, 0, 4, 0], "listed": true, "loved": [], "caveat": "", "short_quote": "I used Lotus Notes in the 00s and 10s and greatly preferred it to Outlook.", "icon": false, "domain": null, "github_repo": null, "official_url": "", "pricing": "", "aliases": ["Lotus Notes"], "verdict": null, "praise": [{"label": "", "summary": "", "quotes": [{"id": 794179473, "item_id": 49636217, "url": "https://news.ycombinator.com/item?id=49636217", "by": "Hikikomori", "date": "2026-09-09", "stance": "recommend", "quote": "horrible to use compared to notes", "excerpt": "We migrated to office 365 around 2013 from notes, horrible to use compared to notes. The project was supposed to pay for itself with loweered license fees for notes users, then it turned out we had 2-3k apps in notes without any migration plan or budget, so most people still needed a lotus license for years.", "context": "", "use_case": "enterprise collaboration", "switched_from": "", "story": "Lotus Notes and the dangers of starting from scratch"}, {"id": 794055904, "item_id": 49628494, "url": "https://news.ycombinator.com/item?id=49628494", "by": "ryanm101", "date": "2026-09-09", "stance": "recommend", "quote": "Imo it was ahead of its time and heavily hamstring by Outlook dominance", "excerpt": "The worst thing about notes was its ui revamp in 8. It was heavy and slow, I tended to run classic ui. Yes f5 was an issue but only until you did it a couple of times then you remembered. It was funny I recall never having much to do on the domino server, and even the client was pretty stable. When we migrated to Outlook there were non stop server side issues. The fact it had a built in DB was really useful for exten", "context": "", "use_case": "email and extensible apps", "switched_from": "", "story": "Lotus Notes and the dangers of starting from scratch"}, {"id": 793992880, "item_id": 49624555, "url": "https://news.ycombinator.com/item?id=49624555", "by": "VagabundoP", "date": "2026-09-09", "stance": "recommend", "quote": "Lotus Notes was underrated imo.", "excerpt": "Lotus Notes was underrated imo. We used it as a combo Helpdesk ticketting, email, wiki/doc tool and it worked so well. It took 20 years for other tools to catch up and webapps still arent as functional.", "context": "", "use_case": "helpdesk tickets, email, wiki", "switched_from": "", "story": "Lotus Notes and the dangers of starting from scratch"}, {"id": 793991936, "item_id": 49624496, "url": "https://news.ycombinator.com/item?id=49624496", "by": "orthoxerox", "date": "2026-09-09", "stance": "recommend", "quote": "I used Lotus Notes in the 00s and 10s and greatly preferred it to Outlook.", "excerpt": "I used Lotus Notes in the 00s and 10s and greatly preferred it to Outlook. The full featured one, not the OWA version. Yes, the UI was clunky, but it was quick. It was McMaster-Carr quick. The mail client was never a barrier between you and your emails. These days I miss Outlook, as the new web-based solution we replaced it with is even worse.", "context": "", "use_case": "email", "switched_from": "", "story": "Lotus Notes and the dangers of starting from scratch"}]}], "caveats": [{"label": "", "summary": "", "quotes": [{"id": 794048496, "item_id": 49628031, "url": "https://news.ycombinator.com/item?id=49628031", "by": "freediddy", "date": "2026-09-09", "stance": "warn", "quote": "It was mostly useless and overcomplicated most things.", "excerpt": "I used Lotus Notes back in the day. The author is vastly overstating how useful it was. It was mostly useless and overcomplicated most things. Yes, many of the concepts are being used today but at its time, it was an feature that was waiting for a use case.", "context": "", "use_case": "", "switched_from": "", "story": "Lotus Notes and the dangers of starting from scratch"}, {"id": 794028208, "item_id": 49626763, "url": "https://news.ycombinator.com/item?id=49626763", "by": "jhallenworld", "date": "2026-09-09", "stance": "warn", "quote": "No such feature in Notes- I remember having a hard time finding messages, and that its search feature would miss things somehow.", "excerpt": "I had to use Notes after our company was acquired by IBM in 2005. As a startup, we used Thunderbird. What I remember was that finding things in Thunderbird was just so much faster because it had a filter feature (you enter a string, then instantly only the messages with that string would be shown). No such feature in Notes- I remember having a hard time finding messages, and that its search feature would miss things ", "context": "worked at a startup acquired by IBM in 2005", "use_case": "email", "switched_from": "Thunderbird", "story": "Lotus Notes and the dangers of starting from scratch"}, {"id": 793999760, "item_id": 49624985, "url": "https://news.ycombinator.com/item?id=49624985", "by": "le-mark", "date": "2026-09-09", "stance": "warn", "quote": "I couldn\u2019t figure out how to do anything with it", "excerpt": "Interesting to read it originated as part of PLATO. I used notes at a company in the early oughts. This company was a big user of ibm mainframes. It was bizarre and although it was purported to have all this capability I couldn\u2019t figure out how to do anything with it; like access lotus script. As an inveterate tinkerer, it frustrated me, I assumed I didn\u2019t have permissions or something. I did a second stint at the sa", "context": "", "use_case": "", "switched_from": "", "story": "Lotus Notes and the dangers of starting from scratch"}, {"id": 793990160, "item_id": 49624385, "url": "https://news.ycombinator.com/item?id=49624385", "by": "Nursie", "date": "2026-09-09", "stance": "warn", "quote": "it was a horrible email client", "excerpt": "\"Lotes\" as we used to call it in my first job. Yes, it could do all sorts of things, but it never seemed to do any of them well, and it was a horrible email client. Perhaps it was revolutionary in the 80s, but by the 00s it was clunky, heavyweight and painful to use.", "context": "", "use_case": "email", "switched_from": "", "story": "Lotus Notes and the dangers of starting from scratch"}]}], "who": [{"by": "jbgreer", "context": "architect at a large retailer in the 90s", "url": "https://news.ycombinator.com/item?id=49626051", "date": "2026-09-09"}, {"by": "rm445", "context": "former employee at a British blue-chip company", "url": "https://news.ycombinator.com/item?id=49624334", "date": "2026-09-09"}, {"by": "mathattack", "context": "worked at a Lotus shop in the 90s", "url": "https://news.ycombinator.com/item?id=47437443", "date": "2026-03-19"}, {"by": "senectus1", "context": "managed a Domino/Notes environment early in IT career", "url": "https://news.ycombinator.com/item?id=47434860", "date": "2026-03-18"}], "tags": [], "use_cases": ["email", "enterprise collaboration", "internal tools and databases", "email and extensible apps", "store communication system evaluation", "helpdesk tickets, email, wiki"], "compared": [{"slug": "microsoft-outlook", "name": "Microsoft Outlook", "co": 3, "switched_from": 0, "switched_to": 2}, {"slug": "thunderbird", "name": "Thunderbird", "co": 1, "switched_from": 1, "switched_to": 0}, {"slug": "office-365", "name": "Office 365", "co": 1, "switched_from": 0, "switched_to": 1}, {"slug": "lotus-1-2-3", "name": "Lotus 1-2-3", "co": 2, "switched_from": 0, "switched_to": 0}, {"slug": "lotus-sametime", "name": "Lotus Sametime", "co": 2, "switched_from": 0, "switched_to": 0}], "makers": [{"id": 757133313, "item_id": 47320832, "url": "https://news.ycombinator.com/item?id=47320832", "by": "gadders", "date": "2026-03-10", "stance": "recommend", "quote": "I was at LotusSphere when Lotus Notes 4 was announced and demo-ed. That got a standing ovation.", "excerpt": "I used to work for Lotus, supporting 1-2-3. Mucking around with autoexec.bat, config.sys, emm386 etc to get 1-2-3 to load was fun. Lots of TSRs using up memory. The amount of times I had to tell people to create a \"clean config\" by commenting out most of autoexec.bat... We also had to post people floppy disks with the correct printer driver on. No downloads in those days. \"What would a piece of software have to do to", "context": "former Lotus support employee", "use_case": "", "switched_from": "", "story": "Lotus 1-2-3 on the PC with DOS"}], "threads": [{"url": "https://news.ycombinator.com/item?id=49623937", "title": "Lotus Notes and the dangers of starting from scratch", "mentions": 10}, {"url": "https://news.ycombinator.com/item?id=47385439", "title": "LotusNotes", "mentions": 2}, {"url": "https://news.ycombinator.com/item?id=47279633", "title": "Lotus 1-2-3 on the PC with DOS", "mentions": 2}, {"url": "https://news.ycombinator.com/item?id=50130228", "title": "Microsoft Teams is a red flag", "mentions": 1}, {"url": "https://news.ycombinator.com/item?id=48648371", "title": "75% More Pedestrians Have Been Killed Since 2009. Giant Trucks and SUVs Are Why", "mentions": 1}], "sentiment_by_month": {"2025-11": {}, "2025-12": {}, "2026-01": {}, "2026-02": {}, "2026-03": {"warn": 1, "neutral": 2}, "2026-04": {}, "2026-05": {}, "2026-06": {"neutral": 1}, "2026-07": {}, "2026-08": {}, "2026-09": {"neutral": 2, "warn": 4, "recommend": 4}, "2026-10": {"neutral": 1}}, "quotes": [{"id": 802284338, "item_id": 50142771, "url": "https://news.ycombinator.com/item?id=50142771", "by": "wolvoleo", "date": "2026-10-18", "stance": "neutral", "quote": "We used it until about 2019 :S", "excerpt": "Haha yeah it's ancient I know. We used it until about 2019 :S The reason was that during the years a lot of people had been 'creative' and built tools in its database/scripting language. Many of these tools had been abandoned but still had wormed their way into critical business processes. It took us years to decommission most of them and in some cases rebuild them with modern tech. I really miss Lotus Sametime thoug", "context": "", "use_case": "internal tools and databases", "switched_from": "", "story": "Microsoft Teams is a red flag"}, {"id": 794179473, "item_id": 49636217, "url": "https://news.ycombinator.com/item?id=49636217", "by": "Hikikomori", "date": "2026-09-09", "stance": "recommend", "quote": "horrible to use compared to notes", "excerpt": "We migrated to office 365 around 2013 from notes, horrible to use compared to notes. The project was supposed to pay for itself with loweered license fees for notes users, then it turned out we had 2-3k apps in notes without any migration plan or budget, so most people still needed a lotus license for years.", "context": "", "use_case": "enterprise collaboration", "switched_from": "", "story": "Lotus Notes and the dangers of starting from scratch"}, {"id": 794055904, "item_id": 49628494, "url": "https://news.ycombinator.com/item?id=49628494", "by": "ryanm101", "date": "2026-09-09", "stance": "recommend", "quote": "Imo it was ahead of its time and heavily hamstring by Outlook dominance", "excerpt": "The worst thing about notes was its ui revamp in 8. It was heavy and slow, I tended to run classic ui. Yes f5 was an issue but only until you did it a couple of times then you remembered. It was funny I recall never having much to do on the domino server, and even the client was pretty stable. When we migrated to Outlook there were non stop server side issues. The fact it had a built in DB was really useful for exten", "context": "", "use_case": "email and extensible apps", "switched_from": "", "story": "Lotus Notes and the dangers of starting from scratch"}, {"id": 794048496, "item_id": 49628031, "url": "https://news.ycombinator.com/item?id=49628031", "by": "freediddy", "date": "2026-09-09", "stance": "warn", "quote": "It was mostly useless and overcomplicated most things.", "excerpt": "I used Lotus Notes back in the day. The author is vastly overstating how useful it was. It was mostly useless and overcomplicated most things. Yes, many of the concepts are being used today but at its time, it was an feature that was waiting for a use case.", "context": "", "use_case": "", "switched_from": "", "story": "Lotus Notes and the dangers of starting from scratch"}, {"id": 794028208, "item_id": 49626763, "url": "https://news.ycombinator.com/item?id=49626763", "by": "jhallenworld", "date": "2026-09-09", "stance": "warn", "quote": "No such feature in Notes- I remember having a hard time finding messages, and that its search feature would miss things somehow.", "excerpt": "I had to use Notes after our company was acquired by IBM in 2005. As a startup, we used Thunderbird. What I remember was that finding things in Thunderbird was just so much faster because it had a filter feature (you enter a string, then instantly only the messages with that string would be shown). No such feature in Notes- I remember having a hard time finding messages, and that its search feature would miss things ", "context": "worked at a startup acquired by IBM in 2005", "use_case": "email", "switched_from": "Thunderbird", "story": "Lotus Notes and the dangers of starting from scratch"}, {"id": 794016816, "item_id": 49626051, "url": "https://news.ycombinator.com/item?id=49626051", "by": "jbgreer", "date": "2026-09-09", "stance": "neutral", "quote": "This was a cool feature for distributing apps and data.", "excerpt": "In the 90\u2019s I worked for a large retailer. Our centralized systems were on IBM mainframes, with some Unix servers for specialized work. We ran a small Unix server - really just a decent PC - in the stores. We had very low end machines running DOS-based terminal emulators for POS, etc. Senior management wanted a some kind of communication platform for store employees. Something that could handle shared, broadcast comm", "context": "architect at a large retailer in the 90s", "use_case": "store communication system evaluation", "switched_from": "", "story": "Lotus Notes and the dangers of starting from scratch"}, {"id": 793999760, "item_id": 49624985, "url": "https://news.ycombinator.com/item?id=49624985", "by": "le-mark", "date": "2026-09-09", "stance": "warn", "quote": "I couldn\u2019t figure out how to do anything with it", "excerpt": "Interesting to read it originated as part of PLATO. I used notes at a company in the early oughts. This company was a big user of ibm mainframes. It was bizarre and although it was purported to have all this capability I couldn\u2019t figure out how to do anything with it; like access lotus script. As an inveterate tinkerer, it frustrated me, I assumed I didn\u2019t have permissions or something. I did a second stint at the sa", "context": "", "use_case": "", "switched_from": "", "story": "Lotus Notes and the dangers of starting from scratch"}, {"id": 793992880, "item_id": 49624555, "url": "https://news.ycombinator.com/item?id=49624555", "by": "VagabundoP", "date": "2026-09-09", "stance": "recommend", "quote": "Lotus Notes was underrated imo.", "excerpt": "Lotus Notes was underrated imo. We used it as a combo Helpdesk ticketting, email, wiki/doc tool and it worked so well. It took 20 years for other tools to catch up and webapps still arent as functional.", "context": "", "use_case": "helpdesk tickets, email, wiki", "switched_from": "", "story": "Lotus Notes and the dangers of starting from scratch"}, {"id": 793991936, "item_id": 49624496, "url": "https://news.ycombinator.com/item?id=49624496", "by": "orthoxerox", "date": "2026-09-09", "stance": "recommend", "quote": "I used Lotus Notes in the 00s and 10s and greatly preferred it to Outlook.", "excerpt": "I used Lotus Notes in the 00s and 10s and greatly preferred it to Outlook. The full featured one, not the OWA version. Yes, the UI was clunky, but it was quick. It was McMaster-Carr quick. The mail client was never a barrier between you and your emails. These days I miss Outlook, as the new web-based solution we replaced it with is even worse.", "context": "", "use_case": "email", "switched_from": "", "story": "Lotus Notes and the dangers of starting from scratch"}, {"id": 793990160, "item_id": 49624385, "url": "https://news.ycombinator.com/item?id=49624385", "by": "Nursie", "date": "2026-09-09", "stance": "warn", "quote": "it was a horrible email client", "excerpt": "\"Lotes\" as we used to call it in my first job. Yes, it could do all sorts of things, but it never seemed to do any of them well, and it was a horrible email client. Perhaps it was revolutionary in the 80s, but by the 00s it was clunky, heavyweight and painful to use.", "context": "", "use_case": "email", "switched_from": "", "story": "Lotus Notes and the dangers of starting from scratch"}, {"id": 793989344, "item_id": 49624334, "url": "https://news.ycombinator.com/item?id=49624334", "by": "rm445", "date": "2026-09-09", "stance": "neutral", "quote": "It was universally hated because it felt so clunky and old-fashioned", "excerpt": "I used Lotus Notes until 2022, in a British blue-chip company. Stopped because I left that company - I am almost certain they're still using it, because they weren't close to migrating off the last few use cases. It was universally hated because it felt so clunky and old-fashioned, but it was being used for ERP-type applications with a lot of business process logic that had developed over time. I found it interesting", "context": "former employee at a British blue-chip company", "use_case": "ERP-type business applications", "switched_from": "", "story": "Lotus Notes and the dangers of starting from scratch"}, {"id": 778383408, "item_id": 48648963, "url": "https://news.ycombinator.com/item?id=48648963", "by": "trollbridge", "date": "2026-06-23", "stance": "neutral", "quote": "open Lotus Notes", "excerpt": "I\u2019m pretty sure I\u2019ve seen drivers in the Bay Area conducting a full blown Zoom call, video and all. (I used to have a corporate laptop I put a 4G WiMax chip in, and would boot it and connect to corporate VPN, open Lotus Notes, and then start my one hour commute. Then at work my Notes would be fully sync\u2019d which otherwise took a half hour.)", "context": "", "use_case": "corporate email sync", "switched_from": "", "story": "75% More Pedestrians Have Been Killed Since 2009. Giant Trucks and SUVs Are Why"}, {"id": 758999088, "item_id": 47437443, "url": "https://news.ycombinator.com/item?id=47437443", "by": "mathattack", "date": "2026-03-19", "stance": "neutral", "quote": "It was great until everyone moved to the web, and then it got too clunky.", "excerpt": "I worked at a Lotus shop in the 90s. It was great until everyone moved to the web, and then it got too clunky. Fat clients that stored tons of data locally weren\u2019t the thing anymore. When that company moved off of Notes despite the massive investment, the writing was on the wall even if the product survived for a few decades under IBM.", "context": "worked at a Lotus shop in the 90s", "use_case": "enterprise collaboration", "switched_from": "", "story": "LotusNotes"}, {"id": 758957761, "item_id": 47434860, "url": "https://news.ycombinator.com/item?id=47434860", "by": "senectus1", "date": "2026-03-18", "stance": "neutral", "quote": "Notes client was clunky and not super intuitive", "excerpt": "I used to manage a Domino/Notes environment back in my early days in IT. Domino server was rock solid I never had to worry about it at all. Notes client was clunky and not super intuitive (4.* through to version 6.01 I think) but was still quite a decent client. groundbreaking stuff for the time. I have mostly fond memories of it.", "context": "managed a Domino/Notes environment early in IT career", "use_case": "groupware client", "switched_from": "", "story": "LotusNotes"}, {"id": 757117746, "item_id": 47319859, "url": "https://news.ycombinator.com/item?id=47319859", "by": "smackeyacky", "date": "2026-03-09", "stance": "warn", "quote": "Notes was written by devils simply to drive men mad.", "excerpt": "When I first started my career we were selling PCs into a market where two programs were major roadblocks to windows 3.0 upsells: Lotus 1-2-3 and WordPerfect. If you were a legal secretary WordPerfect was near irreplaceable in a market where the user had transitioned from a typewriter only 5 years ago. Non technical users who has mastered mail merge in WordPerfect would rather beat you up and leave you in the gutter ", "context": "sold PCs early in career", "use_case": "", "switched_from": "", "story": "Lotus 1-2-3 on the PC with DOS"}]}