Adding your Own Items to Context Menu - Hacking Windows XP

Adding an entry to a context menu is very simple. The most difficult part of solving my little puzzle was figuring out how to launch Outlook so it would automatically create a message and attach the desired file to it. After a few minutes on Google researching, I came across Outlook-Tips.net which is a great resource for just the information that I was looking for. According to outlooktips.net, I just had to launch Outlook with the /a switch and the name of the file. Once I had this information, I had all of the pieces of the puzzle and was ready to start putting it together. Perform the following steps to learn how to add your own item to any File Types context menu:

1. First, open up My Computer.
   
2. Click on the Tools menu bar item and select Folder Options.
3. Click on the File Types tab to expose all of the different file types on your computer.
4. Because I usually send Word documents, I scrolled down the list of file types and selected the .doc file extension. Pick any other file extension for which you would like to add an entry.
   
5. Once you have the entry selected, click the Advanced button to bring up the Edit File type window.
6. Click the New button to add an entry.
7. In the Action box, type in the name that you want to appear on the menu. I typed in Send Attached to Message.
8. In the Application Used to Perform Action box, you will want to specify the application and any switches that you will want to use for this new entry. Click on the Browse button to easily browse to an executable file. I navigated until I found OUTLOOK.EXE inside the OFFICE11 folder.
9. When you click OK, the path to the executable file will fill the box. Now you will want to add any application flags at the end of the line. To tell Outlook to create a new message and attach a file to it, I had to add /a after the path followed by %L. The %L is a system variable that holds the name of the file that you are right-clicking on. When I was finished, my box looked like the following (including the quotes): "C:\Program Files\Microsoft Office\OFFICE11\OUTLOOK.EXE" /a "%L".
   
10. When you are finished editing your new entry, click OK to save it.

You are now finished adding an entry to a specific File Types context menu. If you followed all of the previous steps to add the "Send Attached to message" entry, every time you right-click on a Word document, you will now see the new entry, as shown in Figure