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April 13, 2007
The XYZs of Compressed Folders: Xamine Your Zipper
Dear Larry,
Is there any way I can attach a folder to an e-mail message
instead of just one or more files?
I. R.
Dear I. R.,
Yes indeed. And by doing so, you can also attach a folder
containing other files and other folders if you wish.
The trick to accomplishing this is to create a “compressed
folder.” To create a compressed folder on the desktop, right-click a blank
portion of the desktop, then left-click New, Compressed Folder. Then type in the
name you want to assign the folder and press Enter. If you want to create a
compressed folder in another folder—such as your Documents folder—right-click a
blank (white) portion of that folder, then left-click New, Compressed Folder and
type in a name. You’ll notice that the icon for this new object is a folder with
a zipper on it. I’ll explain why below.
Now that you have a new compressed folder, it’s time to drop
in the folder(s) and file(s) you want to attach to your e-mail. There are two
ways to do this. First, you can simply drag and drop other folder and file icons
on top of this compressed folder (in which case they will be copied to the new
folder). Alternatively, right-click a folder or file icon that you want to copy
to the compressed folder, then left-click Copy. Next, right-click the compressed
folder itself and left-click Paste.
Once the compressed folder contains the necessary files and
folders, start your e-mail program and create a new mail message. When you’re
ready, click Attach and browse to the location of the compressed folder you
created. For example, let’s say I created a compressed folder called Test on my
desktop and copied some files and folders into it. I would browse to my desktop
folder by clicking the Desktop icon in the browse window. There I would find the
file Test.zip, which I would then attach to my e-mail message.
That’s right. The compressed folder is in fact a single “zip”
file masquerading as a folder. A zip file is a special file that contains
compressed versions of other files and folders. The best part is, depending on
the type of files you’ve copied into the compressed folder, the resulting zip
file might on average take up half the space of the material within it. That’s a
good thing, because when you’re e-mailing an attachment, you want to keep the
size of the message as small as possible as a courtesy to the recipient as well
as all other e-mail users in the world! I recommend you limit attachments to no
more than 2 MB (megabytes) in size, much less if the recipient of your message
is stuck using a dial-up connection to the Internet.
Once you’ve finished sending your e-mail message, you might
want to delete the compressed folder (aka “zip file”) from your computer. After
all, it’s just a copy of other files and folders that exist elsewhere on your
system!
This is Larry Schneider, logging off.
