How to circumvent Windows Live Mail’s SkyDrive

You can’t actually disable Windows Live Mail’s SkyDrive when you right-click on an image and use Windows’ “Send to” option–not yet anyhow–but there are at least three ways to circumvent this feature.

The best way is provided by Microsoft itself but it’s a bit hard to find if you don’t know it’s there:

In the message composition window (shown above) click on any picture. This will highlight the “Photo album tools” option in green at the top of the screen as shown below:

Click on that to reveal the toolbar as shown in the picture below:

Click on the paper clip icon near the left end of the toolbar and the SkyDrive link is replaced with a real attached file:

Some other ways

Windows Live Mail only sends “image files” to SkyDrive. Image files have extensions like “.jpg”, “.gif” and so on. If your files don’t have those extensions, they won’t get sent to SkyDrive. Changing the extensions yourself and requiring the receiver to change them back is more trouble than it’s worth. However this does mean that you could:

• Zip (compress) all the images into one file and send that. (This can be done even with just one image of course.)

• When selecting the images to send, include at least one non-image file. This could just be a dummy.txt file in the same folder. (To create a non-image file: Right click the window that has the pictures and then pick New → Text Document.) Now select your pictures, including the non-image file of course. Right click again and pick Send to → Mail recipient. With this method you’ll still get the option to resize the images but they'll end up attached rather than being sent to SkyDrive. You can even right click the dummy.txt file and remove it from the message before sending.

Eventually somebody will come up with a Registry fix to turn this feature off or perhaps Microsoft will make it optional. In the meantime, you can use one of these methods to keep images that you email from being sent to and stored on SkyDrive.

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