You are using Lotus Notes as your mail platform. Unfortunately your mailbox has a quota you’ve already reached and you need space. A solution consist in exporting regularly your mails on your local machine to free up your inbox. Here is a little article documenting the export procedure using the fat desktop client.

If screenshots were taken with a french version, instructions given here are for the english one. This will give you enough clues to perform the export whatever the localisation is. The Lotus Notes version I used was the 7.0.2 release.

So first, let’s start Notes and open your mailbox. You should be on a screen similar to this one:

French Lotus Notes inbox with every sender and subject blurred out, the quota gauge in the lower left reading 83% of 90 MB

Then, go to the File › Database › New Copy menu:

File menu drilled into the database submenu with the new-copy entry highlighted

And you’ll get an export screen that’ll let you choose where to create a local copy of your database:

Database copy dialog set to the local server, titled Kevin's july 2010 archives and writing out to kevin-mails-2010-07.nsf, copying both design and documents

This will generate a .nsf file containing all your current mail.

Now that you have a backup, you are free to delete all your mails in Lotus Notes. By following this procedure regularly, you can create yearly or monthly archives of you mails without reaching the mailbox quota! For example, this is how my local archive folder looks like:

Explorer listing of the resulting archives, one .nsf file per month from December 2009 through June 2010

9 archived comments

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  1. Anonymous

    Thanks for ur information

  2. AL

    Thanks a lot for your information. You really benefit many people of Lotus-Don't-know-how like me. You are great.

  3. Anonymous

    If you only want the text content, you can use File > Export

    1. Ribbles

      Or create a rule forwarding everything to GMail/Hotail/Cloud, then you have everything archived and searchable!

      1. rec

        can i forward all stuff which i have already recieved/send ?

  4. William

    how to export just a folder?
    my lotus notes is 8.5

  5. John

    Excellent - many thanks. What I don't get is why this simple info is available nowhere in Lotus Notes help?. Perhaps this is the main reason I want to migrate. Thanks again.

  6. Harshad

    How to import the exported mails ?

  7. Shanda

    Is there a way to export Lotus Notes folders rather than copying each email within the folder one by one?