Lotus Bloat More struggles with my Lotus Notes client today. While you can use Notes to create all kinds of sophisticated applications, it handles basic email poorly. We were all complaining about the sluggish client, but it turns out this was because we were working off the networked database, not a local replica. Why the system was configured this way, I don't know. So we make a local replica and things are better, until I go to a meeting with my laptop. It turns out creating a local copy of email does not also make a local copy of your calender or to-do list. I can imagine some fevered engineer now: "what about the class of user who wants to have their mail everywhere, but only wants to see their calender when they're networked?" POP3 does a better job of meeting customer needs.