Attachments provide a means of sending regular documents (the kind discussed in Article 11) through e-mail. For example, to send a picture, song, video, spreadsheet, or Microsoft Word or other document from a folder to someone, you attach that document to an e-mail message. Every ISP puts a limit on how large a file you can attach. The number varies from one ISP to the next. With dial-up accounts the limit is usually 1–3 MB. With broadband accounts it’s more like 10MB. To find out what your attachment size limit is, browse around your ISP’s help documentation for e-mail. Or contact them by phone if need be. You can attach multiple files to an e-mail message. But their combined sizes must be within the limit imposed by your ISP. Optionally, you can combine multiple files into a single compressed folder (Zip file) first. That allows both you and the recipient to handle multiple files as one, and can also reduce the overall file size. See “Zipping and Unzipping Files” in Article 15 for more information on using Zip files. You can attach files to e-mail messages in Windows Mail in several ways.

There isn’t a right way or wrong way. And the end result is the same no matter which method you use—the e-mail recipient gets your e-mail message with the files you attached. So choosing one method or another is just a matter of deciding what’s easiest for you based on what you’re sending and how much you know about files and folders. We’ll start with the basic method of writing an e-mail message then attaching one or more files.

Attaching a file to a message

You can write an e-mail message in Windows Mail first. Then attach one or more files to it. The file (or files) can be anything; word processing documents, spreadsheets, pictures, music, video whatever. You just need to know what folder the file(s) are in, and how to navigate to the folder that the files are in. Here are the steps:

1. In Windows Mail, click Create Mail, fill in the To and Subject lines, and type the body of the message as you would with any other e-mail message. But don’t send the message yet.

2. From the menu bar above the new message, choose Insert  ->  File Attachment. An Open dialog box. To get to the main folders for your user account, click your user account name in the Address bar. To size icons in the center pane, right-click an empty space within that main pane and choose View, then an icon size.

3. Navigate to the folder that contains the files you want to attach to your message.

4. Click the icon for the file you want to attach, or select icons for all the files you want to attach. Then click Open. The file(s) you selected appear in the Attach box.

5. Optionally, to attach files from other folders, repeat steps 2–4.

6. Click Send in the New Message window toolbar. The message will be sent immediately or placed in your Outbox, depending on how you’ve configured Windows Mail. If the message goes to your Outbox, click Send/Receive to send the message.

E-mailing documents from folders

The preceding steps assume you want to create your e-mail message first and then attach files to it. But there’s another way to do it. If you happen to be in the folder that contains the file(s) you want to e-mail, there’s no reason to open Windows Mail first. Instead you can follow these steps:

1. If you haven’t already done so, open the folder that contains the file(s) you want to send.

2. Optionally, to send multiple files from the same folder, select their icons.

3. Right-click the icon of the file that you want to e-mail (or any selected icon) and choose Send To  ->  Mail Recipient.

4. If you’re sending pictures, the Attach Files dialog box opens. Choose whatever size you want the pictures to be. Just make sure the resulting Total Estimated Size is within the attachment size limit imposed by your ISP. Then click Attach. Try a smaller picture size if you go over the limit.

5. A new, empty e-mail message opens in the New Message window with the files already attached. Fill in the To and Subject lines as you would with any other e-mail message.

6. Optionally, change the text of the message to whatever you want to write in your e-mail message.

7. Click the Send button in the New Message toolbar. The message and attached files will be sent immediately or placed in your Outbox. If placed in your Outbox, open Windows Mail and click the Send/Receive button in its toolbar to send the message and its attached files.

E-mailing pictures from Windows Photo Gallery

If you’ve already learned how to use Windows Photo Gallery (Article 22), you can e-mail photos and video clips straight from the gallery. Here are the steps:

1. Open Windows Photo Gallery.

2. Choose options in the navigation pane so that you can see the photos and/or video clip icons of the items you want to send.

3. Select the icons of the items you want to send using the standard selection methods for Windows Photo Gallery.

4. Click E-mail in the toolbar.

5. Choose a size for your pictures, making sure that the Total Estimated Size is within the attachment size limit imposed by your ISP. Then click Attach. A new e-mail message opens in the New Message window with the files already attached. Their filenames appear in the Attach box under the Subject line.

6. Fill in the To and Subject lines as you would with any e-mail message.

7. Optionally, change the text in the body of the e-mail message to whatever message you want to write.

8. Click the Send button in the New Message window. As always, the message is either sent immediately or placed in your Windows Mail Outbox. If it ends up in your Outbox, open Windows Mail and click Send/Receive to send the message. You can use the same technique to send pictures from your Pictures folder, or any folder that contains pictures. Open the folder, select the pictures you want to send, right-click any selected icon, and choose Send To  ->  Mail Recipient.