Working With Attachments in Outlook

PK Protect Attachments is an extension of PK Protect that automatically compresses file attachments that you send with an email message or meeting request using Microsoft Outlook. PK Protect Attachments works with PK Protect to zip email attachments into a .ZIP archive and attaches the archive to the message or meeting request.

You can also, optionally, encrypt and digitally sign message attachments, as well as the accompanying message (though not a meeting request), using current settings for encrypting and signing.

PK Protect Attachments also works when you use other common desktop programs such as Internet Explorer or Microsoft Office applications to send a message containing attachments from Outlook. If zipping is turned on, the attachments are zipped automatically.

PK Protect Attachments installs with PK Protect.

Receiving a Zipped Attachment

Recipients of your messages can use PK Protect or a different ZIP-format utility to decompress ZIP attachments, whether the file has a .ZIP extension or an alternative extension. If an attachment is digitally signed, recipients need PKZIP (version 4 or later) or SecureZIP to authenticate signatures.

If you encrypt the message body, message recipients who have PK Protect can set PK Protect to automatically decrypt and display the message in Outlook. Other recipients can access the message by extracting and opening it from the ZIP in which it is included with any message attachments. See the help for the General page of Mail options for more information on encrypting the message body.

Attachments Encrypted with Strong Encryption

With PK Protect Attachments, you can use either strong encryption or traditional encryption to encrypt email attachments. Strong encryption is much harder to break, but ZIP utilities provided by other vendors may not be able to decrypt strongly encrypted files. Recipients of strongly encrypted attachments will likely need PK Protect to decrypt them. (See the notes on using PK Protect Attachments.)