By clicking on the arrow in the same mail columns, you can sort your mail. If you click on the Date column, for example, you can navigate between the most recent to the oldest mail and the oldest to the most recent mail. One of the improvements in the 8.5.3 client is sorting by subject. Now the prefixes, such as Re: and Fw: are ignored to give you a more accurate sorted view.

Conversation threads allow all messages belonging to the same thread to be grouped together. The conversations' view in a mail file's Inbox or All Documents option shows only the last message in each thread, while the Individual Messages view displays all the messages (as does the standard Inbox). In both cases, the entire thread that a message belongs to can be viewed by expanding the twisty next to the currently selected message.

The total number of messages in the thread is also displayed in parenthesis next to the message subject. To enable conversations, go to the Actions menu and select Conversations.

Searching your mail file for a particular e-mail is now a little bit easier. You can choose to search the entire mail file or if you know what folder the message is in, you can search just that folder. There are a few ways to do this. One way is to right-click on an e-mail in your inbox. You will see the following:

Another option is to use the search bar in the upper right-hand corner. You can also search in views by using the View – Search this View.

To save your previous searches, enable the following preference settings:

Folders are one way to further organize your mail and clear out your inbox. Notes will now remember the folder state when the client is restarted. If a folder was open when you exited Notes, it will be open the next time you start Notes. If it was closed when you exited Notes, it will be closed. The less mail you have in your inbox view, the more efficient and responsive your Notes client will be. Folders can have subfolders as well. When naming folders, do not use system names, such as Inbox, Sent, or use the word Folder or Folders in the name. It is also recommended to stay away from special characters such as _ and /. Folders can be moved or nested by selecting the folder and dragging it to where you want it. Mail can be moved to folders by right-clicking on the message and selecting move to folder, or you can select a message or messages and drag-and-drop to the folder name. Mail rules are a great way to automate this process based on the criteria that you select.

Mail rules can be set up to help you automatically perform actions on mail. By setting the criteria you can have rules act on your mail. The mail rules you create are stored in the Rules folder in your mail application. The current limit on the number of mail rules you can create is 100. The more rules you have, the slower your mail router will run, as it must go through each one before the message is delivered. One way to avoid this limit is to not create rules based on specific senders. You can create rules to a sender's domain to avoid this. To create a rule you can go to the navigation pane of your mail, and navigate to Tools | Rules.

You can also use QuickRules. QuickRules lets you create simple rules based on received messages to act on incoming messages with specific subject lines, sender names, or domains. To use QuickRules select the message you want to create a QuickRule with and go to More and select Create QuickRule. This will pre-populate the QuickRule with the sender and subject from the message. Here is an example of a QuickRule on a spam message. This will send mail to the Junk Mail folder. Make sure you do not include your own domain.

EML files are used by other e-mail systems as a file type. Now in Lotus Notes 8.5.3, you can save your messages in this format. To do this, simply open the message, navigate to File | Save As, and select the .eml file extension. At this time the Lotus Notes client can not import .eml files, it can only save this file type.

Preferences can be set to color-code messages from different senders. This is a handy way to visually see who is sending you mail in your inbox. To color-code mail from specific senders, navigate to File | Preferences, click on Mail, and then click on the Sender Colors tab as shown in the following screenshot:

You can enter more than one name for each color combination. Separate names by pressing Enter (rather than using a comma). To select names from a directory, click on the down arrows next to the field.

To show an icon in your Inbox that identify messages in which you are the only recipient, a primary recipient, or a secondary recipient, based on the number of message recipients and whether your name is in the To or Cc field, go to the following preference:

This is found under Preferences | Mail on the Recipient Icons tab.

There are spell check preferences to correct simple typing errors. You can correct common typing errors. As you type in characters or words within the body of a memo or document, if there's a match to an entry in the correction tables, the entered word will be adjusted to reflect that entry. These options can be found in the Spell Check preference settings.

If you have ever sent out a message that you wish you could have back, Message Recall is the way to do this. Message Recall has to be enabled on the server side, so there is a possibility that you can not use this function. The other caveat is that this will only work on messages sent internally. This means messages sent to the internet can not be recalled. There may be other restrictions as well, depending on how this has been enabled. These include a time limit on recalling messages, and you may not be able to recall a message if the recipient has read it. To recall a message, go to your Sent view and select the message. Then click on the Recall Message button. This will open the Recall Message dialogue box. In the box you can select the recipients to recall as shown in the following screenshot:

After you click on OK, the recall request is acknowledged with a dialog box. You will receive a report if the message was recalled.

You can automatically add a personal signature to all the messages you send. To set your signature file, go to Preferences and click on the Signature tab.

If you have a different signature for internal and external mail, you can use an alternate signature. The signature that you use more frequently should be added to your preferences as described previously, so it's automatically added to all the e-mail you send.

Save your alternate signature file to your computer (it must be a TXT, HTML, JPEG, Bitmap, or GIF file). The file can exist anywhere on your computer.

To use your alternate signature, follow these steps:

There is one other signature. You can choose whether to add a signature, or have no signature on individual messages. To see this option, select the signature setting when you create a new memo as shown in the following screenshot: