I missed your column where you explained how to back up e-mail files in Microsoft Outlook and I am interested in doing this, especially since my son sends pictures of my granddaughters.

So as not to take up so much space on my computer I would like to save them on a CD or diskette. I have Windows XP Home Edition. My computer is an HP Presario with an Intel Pentium 4 processor. I have a DVD writer and CD-writer combo drive.

Allegra Gates @yahoo.com

I’ll recap saving e-mail archives in a bit, Ms. G., but let me start by saying that when I get e-mails with pictures of my own grandsons embedded in the text, I tell my daughter to attach them to the message as picture files.

Whether it’s for family or serious business, embedding photos into e-mail is a terrible way to swap images that matter because the quality of embedded photos is far poorer than the quality of the photo files they represent.

Click on the paperclip

While putting those embedded e-mails together it’s quite simple to also add the photo to the message as an attachment at the same time.

To review: Open an e-mail message and click on the Insert button and then choose File to embed low-resolution versions of images into the note.

Then click on the paper clip icon in the e-mail toolbar to attach the same picture in its entirety as a regular photograph file.

At your end you can open the e-mail and enjoy it and afterward drag the attachments into their own desktop folder for storage and later backing up on CDs.

To do this, click on the double box icon in the upper-right corner of the e-mail display to make it a single box. This shrinks the window, giving you room to drag the icons for attachments onto the desktop.

And that opens the way to describe my favored method for saving e-mail messages by dragging each note into a backup folder just as I described for photo files.

I do this instead of using the various file backup tools built into Outlook and Outlook Express under their File menus. These tools create relatively huge compressed copies of all messages crammed into the same file that are prone to corruption. One burp and all your messages are toast.

Making backups

But if you create a desktop e-mail folder and highlight and drag and drop messages into it, you have individual files for each note. If one goes bad all the rest will be fine. They can be read by dragging them back into any inbox. This also saves a second backup of attached files, like photos.

As a final tip, if one selects the first message in a list and then uses the scroll arrows to go to the bottom they all can be selected by holding doAwn Shift and selecting the final note. Or you can select individual notes in bulk by holding down Control while selecting each desired message.

Contact Jim Coates via e-mail at jcoatestribune.com