Lastly, while we talk about the hassle factor of zipped attachments, I mentioned last time MK-Net.Works have UnzipMail in their product portfolio and that it is a zip file manager. What I should also have said is that if you give it a zip file with just one file inside, it will unzip and launch that file in one operation. So if you have zip files associated with it in your Windows file associations, you can open many zip files directly to their content by launching the zip file in Notes. That's valuable functionality and significantly reduces the access hassle for these attachments. But I have my doubts as to whether it will work with Notes 6's ability to re-attach edited files to edited documents. Notes checks to see if the detached file has changed. Since it won't have changed, it doesn't reattach anything.

PKZip for Lotus Notes
I've had contact with PKWare (at http://www.pkware.com) since I submitted the last piece. I've spoken with their tech support people. I have also had a detailed conversation with their product development people, where we discussed the product design shortcomings I described. They accepted the issue on the template changes, on whether the ACL (Access Control List) would allow it, and on the signatures on the design elements, and they seemed pretty keen on making good the deficiencies.

They told me that while the documentation does make note of the limitations to Notes 5.0.10 and 5.0.11, it should work with a Notes 6 client. They have it working with Notes 6 in their lab but were not ready to support it. They also told me that the design intention is that it should compress the attachments on the actual mail operation, but that it should also compress on save operations such as Save as Draft or when you file your own copy in a folder.

My installation had expired by the time I spoke with them, and they graciously gave me code to enable me to re-install the evaluation copy a second time and try again. I did see some new issues on the re-install, and it would not do the Notes Configuration piece properly unless I switched to a local location. But it still didn't work for me, and this time I decided to dig a little bit.

What I found, by exploring the code and running it with the debugger, was that it actually does work. However, it depends on what you do and how you do it. What PKWare has done is to add LotusScript code to various places in the Notes mail template, which calls out to PKZip modules. The key part of their LotusScript code is an interrogation of the variable ActionInProgress. This is a Lotus variable, managed in the standard Notes Mail LotusScript library CoreEmailClasses. This variable is set by various parts of the Notes mail User Interface so that the core code can determine what is going on. PKZip will only zip the attachments if the values in this variable are 1024 (Send) and 2097152 (Send and File). And if you click these action buttons on the mail form, it does indeed work, though I got the zip dialog box twice.