Why IBM Notes is needed

You may wonder why, if a DXL file is self-contained, DXL-MSG requires the IBM/Lotus Notes client (or Domino server) to be installed on the system that it is running on.  What DXL-MSG actually depends on is not the Notes client itself but a set of libraries installed with both the client and server that provide certain Notes-related functions to third-party applications. DXL-MSG can do most of its work without any help from Notes but there are a couple of areas where it has to depend on using a Notes function or two.  The best example is that many DXL files contain images in a Notes-proprietary format.  Since this format is not openly documented, DXL-MSG must use some Notes code to convert such images to a standard format such as JPEG.