Barry on January 16th, 2007

I’ve been using Google Mail for the last couple of years, but never realized that the system won’t let you send .EXE files as attachments.  (The file in question was a Flash press release for legal tech.)
 
What to do?  How about zipping the .EXE file.  Turns out that doesn’t work, either because Google understands that there is an .EXE file lurking beneath the ZIP archive veneer.  (Pretty smart system, eh?)

A quick search on a Help forum provides the solution: change the suffix from .EXE or .ZIP to something innocuous and tell your correspondent to change it back when received.

Voila! It works.  file.ZIP changed to file.XYZ is sent without difficulty. Pretty stupid system, eh?  (Don’t know if it was received, yet, but that’s another problem. )

There was also a suggestion of using a system called yousendit.com.
This apparently is a mail system that uses large files (not the problem here) and also doesn’t care about .EXE files.  That would have been my next try, but the rename workaround worked.
Does anyone know anything about yousendit?
Or should I put it on the review list?

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