If you are a South Indian, have a long name, use lotus notes and want to send encrypted e-mail using Internet Certificates…you may just be out of luck! Why?
Lotus Notes 6 does not support importing of PKCS#12 (.pfx) certificates which have the CN (Customer name), OU (Organization unit), O (Organization), CA (Certificatio Authority) fields together more than 255 characters. Many of my south Indian friends in fact have names that are 40 characters themselves! Alongwith the O, OU and the CA taken together this could easily exceed more than 255 characters. On encountering such a situation, Lotus Notes also gives a friendly error message which my friends may not find quite amusing at that point “Name too long”. Once you encounter this error, you cannot proceed with the import. To work around this see if you can reduce the characters in OU and O fields because your e-mail ID has to match the one in Lotus.
I also found a useless response from IBM to get rid of this problem. Their response was pretty much “learn to deal with it! we won’t correct our stupid software”.
Justin’s written a pretty useful how to on importing S/MIME certificates into Lotus notes.