Customize the Contents of Your Send To Menu without Additional Software

The Send To menu (which appears when you right-click on a file or folder in Windows) is one of Windows' unsung heroes. It makes it easy to send a file to all sorts of places quickly and easily -- to the Desktop, an e-mail message, your Dropbox account, or a zip folder, just to name a few.

Every time I see someone recommend some program you can use to customize the Send To menu, I shake my head in disbelief -- why bother, when Windows makes it a snap to edit the menu right out of the box?

The targets of the Send To menu are stored in an ordinary folder you can add to and remove items from. If there's stuff in your Send To menu you never use, just delete them. You won't break anything, but you'll clean up the menu and make it easier to select Send To options you actually want. Personally, I don't have a fax machine, so I deleted "fax recipient" long ago. Likewise, I would never send a file to the Desktop in a million years, so I deleted that too. On the other hand, I commonly need to send files to a public share, so I dragged a shortcut to that folder to the Sent To folder.

So where is this mystical, easy to use Send To folder?

If you have Windows XP, you'll find it here:

C:Users{YourUsername}AppDataRoamingMicrosoftWindowsSendTo

Shell:sendto