How do I attach files to email message in Windows Live Mail?

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Email, or electronic-mail, started as way to communicate using text. However, over the years, and with technological developments, the popularity of email has grown by leaps and bounds and it’s because one can quickly send all kinds of digital files including photographs, images, documents, spreadsheets, music or video using this medium.

All these additional files are bundled along with the email message as attachments. They can then be opened, downloaded and saved by recipients on their device – computer, tablet, mobile phone.

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This page explains how to send various types of files as attachments with email messages using the Windows Live Mail email client – the latest from Microsoft.

Attach images and photographs to email

Sharing your holiday or party pictures with friends, family and colleagues has never been easier and the Windows Live Mail email program makes the process of sending photographs so much fun. In the development of this software, Microsoft had realized that since almost everyone has a digital camera nowadays and sharing of photographs and pictures is only going to increase. However, photographs taken from conventional digital cameras are quite large in file size and if you plan to attach a few of them with your email, the size of the message would increase tremendously. This leads to two main problems – wastage of the Internet bandwidth and choking of the recipient’s inbox.

The company came out with a novel solution on Windows Live mail which they call Photo e-mail. With this feature one is able to send large photographs as thumbnails (smaller sized versions) as email attachments. The large sized photographs are stored at a private web location. Only when the recipient clicks on one of the thumbnails expressing a desire to view in a bigger size, is the larger version downloaded from the web. I consider this a sort of marriage between email and image web hosting.

Anyway, as with other things on Windows Live Mail, you can change the look, format and layout of the thumbnails. You can even perform small image editing with the Photo email feature.

Please note: File compression tools such as Winzip or WinRAR are quite good when it comes to text documents. They unfortunately cannot do a good job with photographs taken from digital cameras because these are, typically, in JPG format which has already compressed the image.

Please read sending photographs and pictures over email – Windows Live Mail Photo email feature, for more details.

Email attachments – Word, PDF, spreadsheet documents etc.

new email button of Windows Live Mail

To attach any type of document to an email in Windows Live Mail, click on the “New” button or go to “File” -> “New” -> “Mail Message“.

In the new message window, hit the “Attach” button to browse for the files you want to attach with this email message. If you plan to send images and photographs, Windows Live Mail may prompt you to use the Photo email feature (refer paragraph above).

Button to add email attachments in Windows Live Mail

You should remember that in order to view and open the files you are sending over email, the recipients need to have the required program. For instance, if you send a Microsoft Word document to someone and they don’t have it installed on their computer (or even the simple reader), the recipient would not be able to open and view the document. Hence it is imperative that you take due care before sending the email else you efforts might go to waste.

Attach music files to email

Music files are large in size – at least larger than conventional photographs from digital cameras and text documents. You can go ahead and send a couple of music files as email attachments, but if there are lots of these files, it is better to use a free file uploading and sharing online service in which you post all the big files and then send a simple email to all with the download link.

Any large email attachment is bound to choke the inbox. Though, email storage is increasing each day (take a look at Gmail from Google or the unlimited space offered by many services), there is always a limit placed on the size of the email attachment.

Sending video file attachments over email

Video files are generally very large in file size. A few of minutes of video might be in tens of megabytes depending on the video dimensions and file format. Though you can send video email attachments, limited only by the amount of inbox space at the recipient’s account, I suggest a better alternative. Video hosting web sites such as Youtube.com are not only convenient but also display the video through the browser in a format that is quick to download. This saves precious internet bandwidth for everyone. Once you upload your video to youtube.com, you can invite all your friends and family to view it online.

Sending emails with file attachments

The time taken to send emails with file attachments will vary depending on the number and size of the email attachments and your internet connection speeds. Large attachments would increase the size of the email message and would thus move much more slowly from your outbox than emails with small sized attachments.

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