Emailing Links Instead of Files

The “Send To” menu is one of the things I like best about Microsoft Windows. It enables me to select one or more files and send them somewhere. An example would be selecting a file and using the “Desktop” option to have Windows create a shortcut to the file on my desktop. If you aren’t familiar with the “Send To” menu, then you can read more about it at this Microsoft page.

What’s even better is that I can customize the “Send To” menu by adding my own items. All I need do is create a shortcut and drop it in the “Send To” folder. Say I need to copy files to a certain folder on a regular basis. I can create a shortcut to the target folder and drop it in the “Send To” folder. Now when I right-click a file and select “Send To” I’ll see that folder as one of the options. That’s pretty handy, but there’s another way I can modify my “Send To” menu. I can drop a VBScript file in it. This allows me to do a lot more than just copy files to a folder or open them in a program.

Here’s how it works. When I select a script from the “Send To” menu Windows runs the script and passes the paths of the files I have selected to the script as parameters. Inside the script I can retrieve those parameters via the script’s Arguments collection. Each argument is the path to a file. The script can then perform any operation I want on each of those files.

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