The best known makers of compression tools, Winzip has now released a small companion program to work directly with Microsoft Outlook.
The best known makers of compression tools, Winzip has now released a small companion program to work directly with Microsoft Outlook.
WinZip Companion for Outlook saves you the trouble of creating a compressed file then attaching it to an email. Instead you just attach the files directly to an email message and when it comes time to send, the Companion will compress the selected attachments into a single smaller file for dispatch.
It works quite seamlessly, in fact after installation we initially wondered if the product was present at all (in a new email look under the Tools menu for the configuration options.
You can compress attachments automatically, never or on request. There’s also an option to encrypt the ZIP file and a minimum size of attachment to bother compressing. The default list of attachment extensions is mostly a list of compression formats, with the notable exception of RAR.
You might want to consider adding to this list other compressed formats like GIF and JPG images or WMA and MP3 music which rarely benefit from additional compression.
Naturally the receiver must be able to handle ZIP files to read the contents but that’s rarely a problem these days. However if you choose one of the AES encryption options then the receiver will need a specially compatible file viewer like Winzip 9.0.
WinZip Companion for Outlook costs US$19 and there is a 45 day free trial download.
It works with Outlook 2002 and 2003 – also Outlook 2000 but the latter only if do not use MS Word as your email editor (aka WordMail).
