Retrieve lost user's login id.

Basically, without the original user.id file, or a backup copy, your user won't be able to get her original identity back. You could re-generate the Person in the Admin client, but the id file issued will be different internally, and the set of keys used for authentication will be different. As a result, she will be able to login using the new file but encrypted messages can no longer be deciphered.

I hope you have a full backup of your entire Notes/Domino environment, so you can find het mail database back (as in username.nsf) but also her id file. Most admins store the original id file in a safe place. Ask the admin (if he didn't get fired in the process...).

Yes, the admin was fired.  Are you saying the old e-mail is lost without the original user.id?  How can I determine the location of the .nsf file, which I presume contains all of her old e-mail?  Is Domino like IMAP, so that the mail remains on the server as well as the client computer?  If I create a new user.id, can I import the .nsf file?  Is there a program (like Outlook maybe) that can read the .nsf?  Or, is it encrypted so that it .nsf pairs with user.id?

Also, how can we backup all user file.id's so that this disaster never happens again?  Can any user save the one on their Windows computer located in c:\users\username\AppData\Local\IBM\Notes\Data?  How can any user backup their mail?

Actually, I just found this link explaining which files (including user.id) should be backed up and where they are located.

I'll try to explain where everything can be found, usually. All mail is stored (as what they call documents) in one database called username.nsf. This database resides on a Domino server. There can be replicas of the database on other servers, and on the local disk of a pc. The Notes client must be used to open and read documents. When documents are encrypted, only the user whose keys were used to encrypt them can decrypt and read them.

To send mail, the Notes client always needs a server. When using standard Notes mail, a Domino server is required. In this case no local mail database is necessary, as the Notes client contacts the Domino server to open the mail database there. The Notes client can also be set up to use IMAP or POP3. Since all mail handling is done locally, the mail database must be available on a local disk. In order to synchronize the local replica database with the server replica, the replication process runs on a regular basis, usually every hour.

Now, what I suppose that happened when Notes was phased out is that on every pc with a Notes client, a replica of the personal mail database was created, and then the Domino server was stopped, and hopefully backed up. So you might be able to find the mail database in backups of the Domino server. Then again, when there are multiple Domino servers in the environment, backups can be postponed for long times (which is sloppy behavior of course) because the admin thinks that there are multiple replica copies of the same mail database on more than one server and/or local disks. These replicas also serve as backup, for they are in principle identical copies. And if they are not, the replication process will transfer changes between databases regularly.

So, check backups of the local disk (you found the names to look for), and check the server and its backup. If the server is still running, which is probably not the case, the mail database might still be there. The admin can open any database, but he can't read encrypted mail.

If the server is still running, or could be switched back on, there are other ways to get to the mail. Ill discuss that in the next episode, but it only makes sense when the Domino server is running.

Any progress?