Disable Mail-Forwarding for Lotus Notes programmatically

Alain M. Lafon — Mon, 29 Jun 2009 19:53:40 +0000

Lotus Notes has a nifty feature to lull managers into ~~false~~ safety: for volatile/unsafe e-mails (or users), it let’s you disable printing/forwarding and copying to clipboard. This can be done using rules, on the SMTP server and on a per e-mail basis. When writing somebody you really don’t trust with some information (but in his inability to spread the word otherwise – by copy/pasting for example), writing a mail would look like this:

Now, if your victim wants to forward your mail, Lotus Notes would respond with a little pop-up:

This certainly looks like a magical and proprietary feature, doesn’t it? Let’s look at the source of such a “mail”(aka memo in Notus’ language) – you will have to forward it to another mail-client though, because memos can’t be displayed in source:

...
Subject: Testnachricht
MIME-Version: 1.0
Sensitivity: Private
X-Mailer: Lotus Notes Release 6.5.5  CCH1 March 07, 2006
...

As you can see, there is a proprietary meta-flag Sensitivity: Private. It can be reproduced with any decent mail user agent or programmatically. What follows is a little Python code snippet that just does the trick:

import smtplib
from email.message import Message
msg = Message()
msg.set_payload("Testmessage Body")
msg["Subject"] = "Testmessage from Python"
msg["From"] = "preek@dispatched.ch"
msg["To"] = "somebody@somewhere.com"
msg["Sensitivity"] = "Private"
smtp = smtplib.SMTP("localhost")
smtp.sendmail("preek@dispatched.ch", "somebody@somewhere.com", msg.as_string())

But please, don’t use this information unless you absolutely have to. Lotus Notes.. *brr*.

Enjoy(;

If you liked this article, please feel free to re-tweet it and let others know.

Alain M. Lafon » lotus notes

Disable Mail-Forwarding for Lotus Notes programmatically