A workaround for the viral effect of incorrect Lotus notes automatic add to contacts (bad distribution lists)

In Lotus Notes version 8, once an email is sent with an incorrect email address, it can have an almost viral effect. For example, we have a couple internal distribution lists that have been used incorrectly a few times:

askOSS@torolab.ibm.com
askBPS@torolab.ibm.com

(The actual distribution lists have canonical lotus notes addresses askOSS/…/…@…)

I’m on one such distribution list, and this incorrect address has been repeatedly added to my local address book, so once I try to send an email to our askOSS list, it bounces.

The workaround is to search through the local address book, find the bad addresses, and delete them. This unfortunately has to be done on any replicas separately, and it’s temporary because somebody ends up not knowing to do this, and the bad address ends up back in everybodies local address books again.

I asked our IT support folks about this. They’ve opened a defect against Lotus notes for this issue, but have also provided the following workaround:

As a temporary fix

1. You will have to delete the incorrect address from your address book under recent contacts which you have been doing
2. create a contact in the address book with the incorrect address as the main contact name with the right mail address in the contents of it
3. you can disable the recent contact feature to add the names to the recent contacts field (before doing this you will have clear all the bad address from Contacts|recent contacts field)

Steps to disable recent contacts:

• Click File|preferences|contacts
• Check “Do not automatically add contacts to the recent contacts view”
• click ok

I’m hopeful that this will deal with the problem.  The side effect will be that I will have a smaller contact list, but I think I can live with that.