Huge attachments are a problem in the time it takes to do things with the attachment, and they're a problem in providing and managing disk space. To be sure, Notes has always offered the ability to compress attachments as they are stored, but that Huffman compression only applies to the Notes internal representation of the attachment and not actually to the attachment itself. And in Notes 6, there is now an option to use LZ1 compression, but that's still only effective inside a Notes 6 environment. If you send the attachment over the Internet, Notes decompresses it, and of course it then gets re-encoded in MIME for the actual send. So what's actually sent represents the uncompressed file. Lotus has recognized the problem attachments present, as demonstrated by the fact that the Notes 6 mail template finally has Reply and Forward without Attachments actions.

Many email users have got well used to using WinZip and other compression techniques to hand-compress files to be emailed. The zip file format family has become a de-facto standard for compression of one or more files, and it's rare these days to find a recipient who can't deal with such a file, particularly self-extracting zip files. Notes users have it real easy of course, because the Notes 5 and 6 clients have the built-in zip file viewer. This not only shows the zip file contents, but also, unlike many zip file managers, shows the stored directory structure too and enables you to extract the contents. But wouldn't it be nice to be able to zip attachments automatically, as part of the attachment and email process?

Let's look at a few products that enable the Notes user to do this.

WinZip
First we'll look at what WinZip (at http://www.winzip.com) can do, all of which it does outside of Notes. WinZip isn't Notes aware. As you can see in Figure A, with WinZip installed, you can right-click on files in Windows Explorer, and one of the options available is "Zip and Email...."

FIGURE A

With WinZip installed, one of the options available is "Zip and Email...." Click picture for a larger image.

What this does is take the selected files, make a zip file of them, and then using the Windows default email program, format a new email with the file attached to it. This assumes, of course, that the email program can actually be manipulated this way. Notes can be.