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As you would know, due to security reasons Gmail prevents users from sending and receiving executable files (files with the extension “.exe”, “.dll”, “.ocx” or “.bat”). If you try to uploading these files, Gmail will send you an error message: “This is an executable file”. However you may try compressing the files into other formats such as “.zip”, “.tar”, “.tgz”, “.taz”, “.z” or “.gz”. But Gmail is smart enough to know there is an executable inside that compress file.
Now the question is how to send executable files with your Gmail account if you really need to do so? Here’s how its done.
First option is to rename your executable files from the “exe” extension to other formats such as “doc”, “jpeg”, etc. For instance, your file name is “something.exe”; just rename it to like”something.doc or something.jpeg”. Once your contact receives the file, he just need to change the extension back to the original file extension.
Another option is to compress your executable file by using Winrar. For some reason Gmail doesn’t scan files in RAR format. Maybe some special truce with winrar….but who knows.!..?
December 25th, 2007 at 12:20 am
Yep! The better way is Winrar win password protection - Gmail will send it without any problems even if you have virus in your archive! ;)
January 1st, 2008 at 10:54 pm
Google will probably change from extension scanning to header based scanning so even if you change from .exe to .doc they will still know it’s an executable file. Not sure why they don’t scan .rar files, maybe that’s a bug in Gmail. :)
January 1st, 2008 at 11:37 pm
Maybe Gmail won’t do rar’s because it’s paid software to extract them? Rarlabs own it, and distribute it etc.?
January 2nd, 2008 at 12:01 am
Then explain how the software under linux, which is free, is able to create .rar archives and extra files from .rar archives. :)
January 2nd, 2008 at 12:36 am
http://rarlabs.com/download.htm
There might be a proper rar for Linux which is OS, but the one I’ve heard of and ever used is from rarlabs.