Email for the common user is increasingly web-based.  Gone are the days where a mail ISP just dropped your mail in a box somewhere, and the preferred (only?) method of doing anything nice with it was to have a client installed on your machine.  Gone are the days where web-based email was a horrible thing to have to navigate, used only in the emergency where you had no choice but to check it online.

But, Windows has yet to truly acknowledge this.  Send To | Mail Recipient is limited to the client you have installed on your computer.  Every one of us has done it: right click a file, choose Send To | Mail Recipient, and then moan in displeasure as some client we never use (read: Outlook Express) would pop up and declare that you need to set up your account!

This has been driving me crazy.  I use Google Apps for my email, and I was trying to find some solution around this.  There are some odd registry hacks out there that can jimmy-rig it for sending emails and handling some mailto links, but then you run into the problem of sending attachments (read: having to do it manually).  I found relief in the form of Affixa.

Relief, at least, for Gmail and Yahoo! Mail users.  As Affixa’s website puts it: “It’s 2009, and email is web-based.  So why is Windows still partying like it’s 1999?”

By acting as a go-between between your computer and the web client, whenever you choose to send a file to a mail recipient in Windows, Affixa launches, logs into your email account, and creates a draft with the attachment uploaded for you.  You go to your drafts folder, and you see a pre-made email waiting, complete with the standard email subject and body when you do the same a la Outlook.

In what I find a most unique feature, Affixa also keeps an eye out for the so-called “problem attachments.”  If you attempt to send a file that your client does not accept, either because of type or size, it notifies you, and then lets you upload the file to drop.io, which hosts files up to 100MB in size.  Then it generates the email like normal, albeit with a link to download the file instead of the attached file.  This is almost worth it just to never have to hassle with size limits!  Once you set this up, it happens seamlessly.

I asked Chris Wood, Software Development Manager at Draig Technology Ltd and owner of Notably Good Ltd, about how this feature came about.  “I knew that people sometimes struggled with Gmail’s restrictions on file attachments.  As a developer, I occasionally want to send files that are banned by Gmail (e.g. executables, DLLs, etc), so what was once a really easy attachment is now much more complicated because of the malware-infested virtual world we live in.”

“So I looked for a file hosting partner that had an API.  There were surprisingly few choices, but I was equally surprised to find such a good match as drop.io.  They have extremely talented people working for them, great corporate integrity and a vision that’s easy to be impressed by.  So the API was used by Affixa and it became the first product out there to be drop.io-integrated.  We’re looking at increasing drop.io-level functionality in a future release, e.g. use of premium drops.”

The best part is that Affixa is completely configurable so that no program is running on your computer, no consumed memory by an idle mail client, except when the default mail client is specifically called for.  Then Affixa launches, does its thing, and disappears.  That, for me, is a huge bonus, because I have enough useless crap being cleaned off on regular basis as it is.

If, however, you choose to let the Affixa tray program persist, it gives you a number of other benefits.  The Affixa tray client allows you to drag multiple files into a window—called a “basket”—and when you are satisfied, upload them all at once.  On my list, this promoted the Affixa tasktray client from “useless crap” to “much easier way to upload several files at once into my webmail.”

Like many programs out there, this one has a free version, and a paid “subscription” version.  The free version does everything I’ve listed above.  The subscription version is priced at £2 a year.  (Yes, that’s 2 British pounds.  Yes, that’s per year.)  I had to ask.  “Firstly, I never had a desire to get rich off Affixa,” said Wood, “nor do I think it would be possible to do so!  Secondly, I just wanted to cover costs and see some kind of reward for the many days of effort put in.  Again, not any personal reward necessarily, but enough to buy my wife a bunch of flowers for ignoring her whilst doing the programming!”

“The first version of Affixa (which was called ‘gAttach!’ at the time) was donation-ware, yet with hundreds of thousands of users I’d received about £35 in donations, which didn’t cover the costs of development.  Yet the thought of a $20 price tag just seemed completely excessive.  So the penny dropped when my wife said ‘if you’d had £1 for every person that had downloaded the software, you’d have over £100,000 now!’  So I decided to charge 50p a year for it just to cover costs, though the snag there was that micropayments aren’t generally that widely supported yet and transaction charges just made it prohibitive. Which is how we end up at the £2 charge.”

“My hope is that people think ‘I get some neat extra features for less than a box of Corn Flakes – it’s a no-brainer.’  I get the same feeling when I look at the iPhone apps in the iTunes store now – ‘that looks cool and it’s only $2!’”

A list of those neat extra features:

• Setup Multiple Accounts – choose an account each time you send.
• Signature Support – emails created will have your default signature on them.
• Web Browser Choice – assign different browsers to different accounts.
• Zip Support – if you choose to upload multiple files at once from the Attachment Basket, have them zipped automatically.
• Resize Photos – shrink large photos directly from the Attachment Basket.
• Auto To/CC/BCC – If you send to particular people constantly, automatically have their name added to emails you create.

Both the free version and the subscription version allow you to also link with a desktop program.  This is kind of a moot issue with the free version, but when you add in the multiple accounts of the subscription version, things get better.  “More and more frequently,” Wood said, “people use the same computer for work and play. I’m no different: I use Microsoft Outlook for work and web-based email for personal stuff. So by having both Gmail and Outlook accounts configured in Affixa, when I click on a ‘mailto’ link or choose ‘Send To | Mail Recipient,’ I get to choose which account I want to use. That choice isn’t something Windows gives you; you’re locked into one default mail application.”

Affixa has been a handy tool that I’m glad to have downloaded.  It makes my life so much easier, now that I’ve left email clients behind.  Go to www.affixa.com and check it out for yourself.  Affixa is currently available for Gmail (including Google Apps domains), and Yahoo! Mail.

Wood stated that Outlook Web Access, Zimbra, ZoHo, and AOL Mail was also on the list to look into expanding to, so if you are interested in one of those, keep an eye on this.