FIGURE H


The entire process is summarized. Roll over picture for a larger image.

Now you can go on and send the mail, save as a draft, write some more, whatever, as normal. This functionality means that you can also use ZipMail to zip attachments in any Notes document.

If you launch ZipMail from the system tray icon, you first get a dialog like the one shown in Figure I.

FIGURE I


If you launch ZipMail from the system tray icon, you first get a dialog. Roll over picture for a larger image.

Here you can zip one or more files and place the result back in your file system, or you can have the resulting zip file mailed (the Compress and Attach option). This actually creates a mail dialog of its own to create a mail message, shown in Figure J, and then gives the message to Notes to mail.

FIGURE J


A mail dialog of its own is used to create a mail message. Roll over picture for a larger image.

It does not create a Notes mail message and attach the zip file to it.

But the real value of this dialog is the Options button. This gives access to a large number of configuration options, far too many and varied to detail here. You can influence just about everything that ZipMail does from this dialog. A few examples include:

• A choice of four different dialogs that are displayed by File-Attach, from the simple to quite complex;

• You can define what it's to do if compression is unproductive;

• You can specify what sort of zip files get generated, including self-extracting zips. You can do this directly on the more complex file-attach dialogs, too.

But I have to say that it's not perfect. On my rather overloaded Notes 6.0.1 client, I do notice that there's a longer delay between starting the attachment process and the dialog appearing than before I installed ZipMail. And while it hooks to File-Attach and to the Toolbar attach icon, it does not seem to hook to @command([EditInsertFileAttachment]). That's used in the Notes 6 Mail Calendar and Task forms, where click actions are provided in the form. And I have also noticed that sometimes, when I try those clicks in the calendar form, that nothing happens at all, and the Notes client freezes until I press the Escape key. I don't know if ZipMail is causing this, but then again, I don't know that it isn't either. If Designer is open, closing it seems to fix this behavior when it happens. But when it does, I can still attach via File-Attach and ZipMail.

ZipMail has a couple of add-on products, too. One, ZipMail DB Client version is an Admin tool that can be run on a server and used to zip all the attachments in existing databases. If lots of large attachments are a problem, then this could be quite a useful tool. I haven't explored it for this review. One thing to be aware of, I would expect, would be that the first run might take quite a while, because it will zip every existing attachment. And then, of course, the database will have a lot of replication work as a result, which could be a surprise for anyone who replicates over the phone. The second, UnZipMail, isn't really a Notes add-in. Installing it adds a tool called Zip Agent to your machine and associates Zip file with it. Starting it gives the MK ZipAgent, a zip file tool, not dissimilar in concept to WinZip, but with a rather different, and potentially more intuitive, user interface. See Figure K.

FIGURE K


The MK ZipAgent has a potentially more intuitive user interface. Roll over picture for a larger image.