Here’s a quick tutorial to show you how to use free jZip to do file compression. Zip programs compress and decompress files. This is also called file zipping and unzipping. jZip is a free compression zip program which you can download from www.jZip.com.
Sending Emails Attachments As Zipped Archives
You may be sending an email with several attachments. For example you might want to send a Word Document, an Excel Spreadsheet and a photo to a friend. You can attach each file in turn – so in this case you’d be sending three attachments, or you can zip the three files up into one package and send that as a single attachment to your email. The single zipped package of files is sometimes referred to as an archive.
Why Zip Files in the First Place?
Of course the files do not have to be of different types, as they are in my file compression (zip) example. You might want to send 10 Word files or a number of text files. The major reason for sending files as a single zipped file, is to minimise the file size. Most files, when zipped have all the excess space squashed out of them, so the resulting single zip archive is smaller than the individual files that it contains. This makes it faster to send or store.
Zipping doesn’t usually make some images (like .jpgs and .pngs) any smaller as they are aleaady in a compressed format. You’ll find that a number of jpg image files zipped together won’t be much smaller than the total size of the individual files.
The process is shown below in the diagram.
