A golden oldie … I recently had to generate a list of email addresses to use in a Cloud application, based on a mail group in my personal address book.

The names in that group are in the Notes format, obviously, and I need the email address.

Now I didn’t have my Designer ready, nor did I feel like accessing the addressbooks directly. And since this actually was a question from a colleague of mine, with no Notes knowledge at all, I needed to find something that works in a regular Notes client.

So I remembered that Notes includes a built-in @Formula tester. If you put your @formula code in any (regular) field, and press SHIFT-F9, the content of the field is interpreted as Formula language and executed.

The solution

Create a colon ( : ) separated list of formulas (@namelookup) for all the Notes addresses you have. If these contain the @ part (Notes specific routing information), strip that off. You can easily do that in a spreadsheet, or in a text editor.

I end up with a list of formulas , looking like this :

@NameLookup([Noupdate];"Tom Bosmans/GWBASICS";"InternetAddress"):  
@NameLookup([Noupdate];"Joske Vermeulen/GWBASICS";"InternetAddress")

(The limit here is the max. size of a text field in Notes, which is about 900 entries. I had to process about 500 , so not a problem)

Then, I open a new mail and paste the formulas in the “Subject” field. Image:How to convert Notes names to email addresses in the Notes client.

Select the Subject field, Press “SHIFT-F9” , and the formulas will be executed. The result is a list of email addresses.